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TEN MOEE PLAYS OF SHAKESPEARE 



BY THE SAME AUTHOR 



ON TEN PLAYS OF 
SHAKESPEARE 

Third Edition. Demy 8vo. Js. 6d. 7iet 

' Mr. Stopford Brooke's analyses . . . spring 
from a genuine and rich culture, serious study 
and a high, humane character.' — Manchester 
Guardian. 

' The product of a fresh and imaginative 
mind, alive to all the subtle influences of 
poetry, and capable of conveying its impres- 
sions to others.' — Spectator. 

' It may be recommended to every class of 
reader, and most of all to those who have had to 
"get up" a Shakespeare play (with notes) for 
an examination. These essays contain many 
passages of real beauty ; they also contain 
many clear and profound judgments pithily 
expressed. ' — Guardian. 



TEN MORE 
PLAYS OF SHAKESPEARE 



BY 



STOPFOED A. BROOKE 



H 



NEW YORK 
HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY 

1913 



CONTENTS 



/ 



I. MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING 
II. TWELFTH NIGHT; OR, WHAT YOU WILL 
III. JULIUS CESAR 
~JN. HAMLET 

V. MEASURE FOR MEASURE 
VI. OTHELLO 
VII. KING LEAR . 
VIII. KING JOHN . 
IX. HENRY IV. (Part I.) 
henry iv. (Part II.) 
X. HENRY V. 



1 

31 

58 

91 

139 

165 

197 

227 

252 

274 

294 



MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING 

Much Ado About Nothing is the first of those 
three enchanting comedies which, stars of the first 
magnitude, form in Shakespeare's sky a separate and 
brilliant constellation. The other two plays, in the order 
of their birth, are As You Like It and Twelfth Night. 
Two years — 1599, 1600 — saw their glory rise and shine. 

The story of Hero and Claudio (an island of tragic 
sorrow circled in this play by gay and glancing tides of 
comedy) is taken from an Italian source, from a novel 
of Bandello, or from Ariosto's version of the same tale in 
the Orlando Furioso, both of which Shakespeare, if he 
did not read Italian, could have found, one in a French 
and the other in an English translation. The brightness, 
joyousness, and wit which, in the persons of Benedick and 
Beatrice, play round this sad tale, and which in the end 
strengthen its sadness into happiness, are Shakespeare's 
own invention ; and so is the lower comedy of Dogberry 
and Verges, which, blundering through their stupidity 
into humour for the audience, is set into pleasant contrast 
with the native wit and clear intellect of Benedick and 
Beatrice. What is sad in the play is from Italy : what is 
gay is from Shakespeare. 

Nevertheless Benedick and Beatrice, though invented 
in England, are Italian in nature rather than English. 
The Prince (though he be Spanish), Claudio, Antonio, 
Leonato, Hero, and her maids, breathe the air of Italy, 
and are steeped in that Italian life with which Shake- 

A 



2 LECTURES ON SHAKESPEARE 

speare was so well acquainted. No one, even now, can 
continuously read the host of tales from Boccaccio on- 
wards, in which the novel-writers of Italy recorded the 
life of Italy, without a more profound knowledge of that 
life than history will ever teach him ; or without being so 
permeated with its spirit that to live in it would seem to 
him easy, and to write of it (if he had a touch of genius) 
equally easy. Shakespeare had done this. Like all 
those who read at all in London, he had read a host of 
translated Italian tales, and their Italian spirit is in all the 
characters of Much Ado About Nothing. In sentiment, 
in morals, in evil and good passions, in its high honour and 
villainy, in its scenery, pageantry, and love of war, the 
play is Italian. When, then, Shakespeare, penetrated 
with this Italian atmosphere, created Benedick and 
Beatrice, they also became, in his moulding hands, as 
Italian as the rest, even more Italian. They have the 
Italian wit, wit for its own sake, rejoicing in itself — 
Tuscan wit rather than Sicilian — with here and there a 
Fescennine touch. A seriousness emerging now and then 
in the midst of its brilliancy, and characteristically Italian, 
divides it from French wit ; and when the events of the 
play turn towards tragedy, this seriousness gains the 
upper hand with both Beatrice and Benedick. Those 
deep sources of grave feeling (which in the Italian nature 
underlie its easy gaiety) rise to the surface in the dark 
and sorrowful hours of the play, and rule and dignify the 
action of Beatrice and Benedick. The dazzling lightness 
of their wit slips away from them for the time. With 
serious, with almost sombre steadfastness, they meet the 
heavy trial which tests their insight and their strength. 
Moreover, it is when these solemn passions rise in Bene- 
dick and Beatrice, that their love, at first so lightly felt, 
is changed. In the atmosphere of the high emotions of 
pity and indignation which they feel for the fate of Hero, 



MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING 3 

their love grows into a deep and weighty passion. For 
the noble emotions, felt and acting for the sake of others, 
lift the more personal emotions up to their own loftier 
level. 

These then are Italian ; but Dogberry, Verges, and the 
watch are English; true but comic sketches of Shake- 
speare's London. Their jokes are English, their self- 
conceit is English, their ponderous incapacity is that of 
the English small tradesman, their names, like that of 
neighbour Seacole, are English. Yerges sounds odd, but 
it comes from verjuice, and is the name of a usurer in an 
ancient manuscript, ' Father Verges.' Dogberry might be 
now found in Whitechapel. Yet, English as they are, 
they fit in very well with the rest, so great was the amal- 
gamating force of Shakespeare. No shock tells us that 
they are not of the same race as Leonato and Antonio, or 
that they are strangers and foreigners in the streets of 
Messina. 

Considered as a drama, this play has scarcely any plot ; 
but it is none the worse for that. Elaborate plots are 
mostly wearisome in serious comedy. An elaborate plot 
entangles its action, which ought to be simple; and 
encroaches on the characterisation, which ought to be 
manifold, subtle, and complex. In this play the plot is so 
simple that it could be detailed in three minutes, but the 
characterisation is extraordinarily minute, intertwined, 
vivid, incessantly varied, delicately felt along every fibre, 
and alive with thought. It is on this, and not on plot, that t 
the interest of the drama depends. What the characters 
think and feel, not the story, is the play. A number of 
little events, scarcely recognised as we read, push on the 
action, and call from moment to moment on the intellec- 
tual eye to follow them. They are only a background for 
the characters as they grow up into a firmer and closer 
reality. 



4 LECTURES ON SHAKESPEARE 

The scenery is less marked than it is in Twelfth Night 
or in As You Like It. It is of a palazzo and a garden, 
with pleached alleys, arbours, and an orchard; and the 
rest is placed in a church and the streets of Messina. 

Of late, it has been (like many other Shakespeare plays) 
made into a most spectacular affair, and this is a great 
mistake. When dances and elaborate pageantry and 
fanciful a .iditions are crowded into it, the spectacle 
devours the drama ; the soul of Shakespeare seems to fly 
out of the words, the inter-play of the characters tends to 
be swamped, their thought and passion to be overlaid ; 
and we say to ourselves — 'How much better it were 
could I but read this play at home in a pleasant twilight.' 

Again, if we miss in this play, as some do, the involu- 
tions of such a plot as we have in the Merchant of Venice, 
we are more than dramatically satisfied by its vivid 
presentation of human life. Characters of many kinds 
(each delightfully varied) open hour by hour before us ; 
they move in and out of one another as swiftly, as inter- 
changingly, as trout in a stream. Their thoughts are 
quicker than their changes. They are thrilling with 
youth and gaiety, with the serious passions of love, wrath, 
envy, indignation, sorrow, patience, friendship, audacious 
hope, excelling joy — even with the passion of death. 

In a quick succession of scenes, by day, by night, in the 
castle, the villa, and the streets of the city, in the 
masquerade, in the church, we are borne, in vital agitation, 
along the stream of human life. Not even in Twelfth 
Night or in As You Like It is the livingness of life more 
living ; not even in these is Shakespeare's power of creation 
greater. And Beatrice and Benedick are the quintessence, 
the centre of this life. They receive it ; reflect it brighter 
than they received it ; but they radiate more of it than 
either they receive or reflect. 

One dark character is the blackness which sets off the 



MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING 5 

brightness of the play. Don John, the bastard brother of 
the Prince, has no redeeming quality. When Shakespeare 
made a bad man, he generally was stern enough to make 
him villainously bad. He knew that evil, when it was 
nourished, gave birth to more and more of evil, till it con- 
sumed itself. The fate of evil is to be done to death by 
its own venom, perhaps by its own children, so naturally 
moral is the Universe. Don John, soured by his bastardry, 
has cherished envy as his sweetheart, and the snake that 
lives in it has so poisoned his soul, that he belies an inno- 
cent girl only because he wishes to feed the snake he loves. 
He has sinned against the Prince, his brother, and is now 
forgiven and favoured by him. He hates his brother, and 
Claudio his brother's friend, because of their kindness and 
forgiveness. 

I had rather be a canker in a hedge, than a rose in his grace ; . . . 
I am a plain-dealing villain. I am trusted with a muzzle, and en- 
franchised with a clog ; therefore I have decreed not to sing in my cage. 
If I had my mouth I would bite. 

When he hears of the marriage of Claudio, he hopes it will 
enable him to hurt those his envy hates. 

Will it serve for any model to build mischief on ? . . . That young 
start-up hath all the glory of my overthrow : if I can cross him any 
way, I bless myself every way. . . . Let us to the great supper. . . . 
Would the cook were of my mind ! 

Any bar, any cross, any impediment [he is speaking of the marriage] 
will be medicinable to me : I am sick in displeasure to him ; and what- 
soever comes athwart his affection ranges evenly with mine. 

And he devises with his bravo Borachio that the Prince 
and Claudio shall hear Margaret, in the shape of Hero, talk 
with Borachio out of a window as if she were his mistress. 
So the treacherous dog slays, for all he knows, an innocent 
sweet girl — a very flower of youth and beauty. What is 
the use of him ? some say. Why, to make the story out 
of which the play is woven ; to make the little plot which 



6 LECTURES ON SHAKESPEARE 

is to be happily ended. He comes in just to do that ; and 
when the mischievous knot he has tied is undone, he slips 
away to Naples, and no one ever thinks of him again till 
the last two lines of the play. Shakespeare does not like 
the villain to escape, as the villain so often does in real 
life. He does, on the whole, make a point of poetic justice. 
And Don John is seized and punished when the fun is over. 
What too, say others, is the use of Dogberry and Verges ? 
They are an excrescence on the play. No, indeed ; they 
are the means whereby the evil is unravelled, whereby 
tragedy is turned into comedy, and sorrow into joy. And 
if Shakespeare chose to untie the trouble by a fantastic 
means which enabled him to make us happy with laugh- 
ter, and yet to like the old fools who cause our laughter, 
why should he not ? He is no less but more the dramatist 
for that. And the world has been all the pleasanter. 

The characters are, for the most part, disposed in twos 
— Antonio and Leonato, the Prince and Claudio, Dogberry 
and Verges, Hero and Ursula, Borachio and Conrad, 
Benedick and Beatrice. Each of these doublets represents 
a single type, and the type (being set forth in two forms 
with individual differences) is all the more fully repre- 
sented. The Prince and Claudio image the young nobles 
of the time. War is their business and pleasure, love 
their relaxation, incessant chaff their conversation. They 
are never serious except on the point of honour. On that 
they are as sensitive and fretful as a porcupine. They 
are capable of real friendship and, when in arms, of 
brotherhood. The one point where Benedick touches 
their type closely is in this strength of friendship. When 
Beatrice cries 'Kill Claudio/ he answers, 'Not for the 
wide world.' Their type is clear, and Shakespeare knew 
a hundred examples of it. 

Leonato and Antonio represent the typical old men of 



MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING 7 

whom Shakespeare made so many studies. Here, the 
men are both weak from senility, but retain the hot 
temper of their youth. They differ only as two apples 
differ, but Antonio is a more decayed apple than Leonato. 
Their old age makes a good contrast to the youth of the 
Prince and Claudio. This contrast is admirably wrought 
out in the scene where they challenge Claudio for a villain. 
Each of them does it differently. Shakespeare, though 
he keeps the sameness of the type, differentiates the 
individuality of the men. Dramatic change, dramatic 
work for the actor — he never fails in both ! 

Even Borachio and Conrad, types of the mercenary 
bravos who attended on the fine gentlemen of the time 
for what plunder they could get — even these, while their 
type is identical, are differentiated. Each has his own 
character — and each, for the actor, a different part to 
play. So have Dogberry and Verges, though they belong 
to the same type, and to the same class. Verges is 
Dogberry's echo, but he is also something more, and this 
ought to be made clear on the stage. The custom is to 
make Verges very old, and Dogberry a middle-aged man. 
Were I to stage the play, I would make them of the same 
age. One would feel then (more strongly than one does 
when Verges is made a doddering old man) the difference 
between the two men, and yet the sameness of their type. 
Dogberry's masterfulness would then be more prominent, 
and so would his conceit and his ignorance. The contrast 
then would be not of age and middle-age, but of character 
and character. 

As to Hero and Ursula, they have been brought up 
together in the same conventional circle of social life. 
They think and feel the same way, and look on life 
through the same eyes. The only difference between them 
is made by the difference in rank, and by the maid observ- 
ing that difference in relation to her mistress. But their 



8 LECTURES ON SHAKESPEARE 

minds have grown together into harmony. And the 
likeness is so great, that Shakespeare felt it necessary to 
represent in another character the type of the waiting- 
maid which Ursula ceased to present clearly when she 
grew into Hero's likeness. Therefore he placed along with 
this couple who had become one, Margaret, the gamesome 
lady's-maid, who is risquee in her talk with her mistress, 
and has Borachio as a lover — so anxious is Shakespeare 
for variety of character and of life. 

Quite different from these conventional types are 
Benedick and Beatrice. There were, in any society of the 
time, a host of men like Claudio or Leonato, a multitude 
of women like Hero. But there were not half a dozen 
men like Benedick, or women like Beatrice. By dint of 
originality, of intellect, of a high sense of honour, and of 
a nobler passionateness than the rest, they stand alone in 
the midst of the action which seems to whirl round and 
round them, to touch only the outside of them. They 
take their part in their world, but there is a region in their 
soul into which that world cannot enter, which it does 
not understand. No one can class Benedick with the 
Prince or Claudio, or Beatrice with Hero and Ursula. 
Yet these two, like the other doublets, are of a similar 
type of character. Their difference is only that made by 
the difference of sex. They are both fully conscious of 
their originality, of the cleverness, even afterwards of the 
depth of character, which separate them from the rest. 
They own no master, no influence, save their own self- 
mastery, self-influence. Their wit is of a similar kind, 
and both of them rejoice in it, cherish it, are vain of it, 
and excite it to battle. When they love, their passion 
runs on similar lines ; and alike in seriousness when it 
grows deep, is also alike, when the serious matter is past, 
in its power to spring into gaiety in a moment and to 
laugh at itself. Their last battle of wits, before they 



MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING 9 

marry, is an excellent example of this. Then their bright- 
ness of speech, their audacious pleasure in life, out of 
which grows their excellent good sense and their power to 
handle affairs, are also similar. If a star danced when 
Beatrice was born, another star danced close at hand 
when Benedick was born. All this similarity is differenti- 
ated by the difference of sex, and Shakespeare marks 
that at every point. The type is the same, but the woman 
presents it one way, the man in another. 

The isolation of these two from the rest, and their 
similarity, inevitably draw them together. Yet, at the 
beginning, they are sharply in opposition. Each of them, 
proud (the one of his wit, the other of her wit), plays for 
conquest, and neither of them sees that it is because they 
are so like one another that they are antagonistic. They 
touch and sparks fly, but the more they touch the closer 
they grow ; and the sparks have a natural affinity. Their 
original disharmony arises out of a real harmony of 
character, and when the Prince's trick is played upon 
them, it reveals to them their mutual sympathy. There- 
fore they love one another easily. Therefore they think 
and feel together on affairs outside of themselves. Of all 
the characters, the friar excepted, they alone believe in 
Hero's innocence. 

Were they in love before the play opens? That 
question has been put. I answer that they were only 
interested in one another. Beatrice says she will have 
nothing to do with a man, Benedick that he will have 
nothing to do with a woman. This is wonderfully foolish 
if they wish to be apart. Their statement, common 
to both, forces them to think of one another. The 
misanthropist and the misogynist when they meet must 
interest one another. They are fated, I may say, to love 
one another in order that Nature may be avenged on 
their violation of her first command. Benedick admires 



10 LECTURES ON SHAKESPEARE 

the beauty of Beatrice, but hates her tongue. She 
increases his abhorrence of women. That is fatal ; there 
is often nothing so near love as the ignorant aversion 
which forces a man to think of a woman, and to isolate 
her in his imagination — but then, it is not love yet. 
Beatrice asks after him at once, and pounces on him the 
moment he appears. So far it is plain she is interested 
in him. But she likes him now only as a stalking-horse 
for her wit. Of course, she gets the better of him. Not 
only is her wit brighter and quicker, though less intel- 
ligent, than his, but she has the advantage of knowing 
that courtesy will not allow the man to be as sharp as 
she is. Benedick is a gentleman, and his answers are 
restrained by that. Beatrice takes this advantage, and, 
since the advantage is unfair, she is often carried away 
beyond good manners, over-excited by her own wit. 
When he is silent through courtesy, she lays on her 
whip more vigorously. There is no love in that ; and 
Benedick, revolted at last, flies when he hears her in 
the distance. That also is not love, but, for the moment, 
actual distaste. Nor is the talk of Beatrice concern- 
ing Benedick with the Prince and Leonato, or that of 
Benedick concerning Beatrice with the Prince and Claudio, 
such talk as latent lovers would use. It is nothing but 
mockery, not one touch of underlying sentiment. More- 
over, their general conversation is uninterrupted brilliancy 
— flash after flash of cold-cut jewellery. When they are 
really in love, their talk is altogether different. Shake- 
speare marks the change so plainly that the theory that 
they are in love at the beginning of the play falls to 
pieces. After the scene in the garden, their wit is 
traversed by silent moods, by dreaming, by a pretence of 
not being well. Until tne very last scene, they have no 
pleasure in fencing with one another. Love has sheathed 
their swords. 



MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING 11 

Once more, had their interest in one another at the 
beginning even a touch of love in it, it were not necessary 
for Hero or the Prince to lay on so very thick, in the 
garden scene, the painting of the love of Beatrice for 
Benedick, of Benedick for Beatrice. No ; conceive them 
as interested in one another, and no more, when the 
play begins. 

There is one more remark to make upon this play as 
a whole. Less of the passion of love exists in it than in 
any other of Shakespeare's comedies. Claudio's love for 
Hero is plainly of a flimsy character, the light love of a 
soldier for a gentle girl — light enough to suffer that the 
Prince should take her away from him, to make him 
prefer to his love of Hero the favour of the Prince. Hero 
has no intense affection (like Rosalind or Viola) for 
Claudio. She marries Claudio because her people wish 
it. Benedick and Beatrice do not become deeply in love 
till the scene in the church is over, when they see into 
the strength of character they both possess. 

In accord with this, there is less of the lovelier 
elements of poetry in this play than in the other comedies. 
In a pure comedy, it is love which makes the poetry 
beautiful and impassioned ; and Shakespeare, having shut 
out of this subject any intensely felt love, has also shut 
out of it those beautiful passages which he has sown 
broadcast over As You Like It and Twelfth Night. It is 
natural this should be so. He is always within the limits 
of Nature when he had attained, as in these comedies, to 
his matured power. 

In the first scene the matter of the play is introduced 
and prepared ; the characters which events are to develop 
are clearly sketched, and isolated, each in his own indi- 
viduality. Beatrice and Benedick take at once their 
prominent place. The contest of their wits begins. They 



12 LECTURES ON SHAKESPEARE 

both declare their horror of marriage, and we are pre- 
pared for the amusing conversion which is to follow. 
That sketch is made. 

Then Claudio professes his love for Hero; we see his 
heart, and the Prince declares he will help him to Hero. 
It is not much of a heart, but his love-speech is pretty 
enough. It is that of a young noble of the time to whom 
war and glory and adventure were more than love : — 

0, my lord, 
When you went onward on this ended action, 
I look'd upon her with a soldier's eye, 
That liked, but had a rougher task in hand 
Than to drive liking to the name of love : 
But now I am return' d, and that war-thoughts 
Have left their places vacant, in their rooms 
Come thronging soft and delicate desires, 
All prompting me how fair young Hero is, 
Saying, I liked her ere I went to wars. 

That sketch is made. 

Then in the second scene with Don John and his 
bravos the treason which is to trouble all this pleasant 
life is also sketched. And the outline of the whole play 
is before us when the Act closes. All is clear for the 
evolution of the drama. 

The beginning of the second Act is the Masquerade. 
In it all the characters are expanded. Benedick and 
Beatrice are set into still sharper antagonism in order to 
heighten the fun of the stratagem which is to bring them 
together. She gets the better of him again, and the 
natural vanity of a man, especially of one who feels that 
he is superior to the crowd, is so much hurt that his 
relief in finding afterwards (as he thinks) that Beatrice 
has been all the time in love with him, makes him love 
her all the more. To have a sore place healed by the 
person who made it sore is a great incentive to affection. 
But now, he frets and fumes, and, alone with the men, 



MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING 13 

lets loose his hurt vanity on Beatrice, with so much wit 
that half the bitterness is done away with. We laugh 
with him, but we do not laugh at Beatrice. He lets it be 
seen that she has been victorious ; and Beatrice herself, 
conscious of that pleasing element in his speech, would 
have felt flattered rather than hurt. 

O she misused me past the endurance of a block ! an oak but with 
one green leaf on it would have answered her ; my very visor began 
to assume life, and scold with her. . . . She speaks poniards, and every 
word stabs : if her breath were as terrible as her terminations, there 
were no living near her : she would infect to the north star. I would 
not marry her though she were endowed with all that Adam had left 
him before he transgressed : she would have made Hercules have turned 
spit ; yea, and have cleft his club to make the fire too ... all 
disquiet, horror, and perturbation follow her. 

So much then is added to his character — a little fret of 
vanity dwells with his wit. It is not an unpleasant 
vanity. He can laugh at it himself, and he does. He is 
not one inch less a man for it, nor does it interfere with 
his honesty of purpose or with his good sense. And now 
another trait is added to his character. He hears that 
the Prince, who has promised to help Claudio to Hero, 
now woos her for himself. At this, his sense of honour, 
which is deep, is offended ; and he tells Claudio what he 
has heard. Claudio, to whom the favour of the Prince is 
more than Hero's love, takes this betrayal too easily for 
a lover. But Benedick does not ; he lets the Prince know 
plainly that his conduct has been dishonest to friend- 
ship and to his word, and is heartily glad when he finds 
he has been mistaken. In this way, the serious element 
in Benedick's gay character is made by Shakespeare to 
emerge. We begin to see what he will be when trial and 
trouble come, when Beatrice needs a solid man on whom 
to lean. 

Beatrice also develops into something higher. She 
comes in with Hero and Claudio, and is delighted with her 



14 LECTURES ON SHAKESPEARE 

cousin's happiness. We have only met her, as yet, as a 
sharp- tongued lady. Now we see her affectionate heart. 
She does not betray one touch of sarcasm in this scene. 
She is only gay and loving. ' Cousins, God give you joy/ 
she cries out of a full heart, and we forget her biting 
speech. The central waters of her life are merry, but not 
shallow. 'In faith, lady,' says the Prince, 'you have a 
merry heart.' And her light talk with him, when she 
refuses to marry him, is as pleasant from its good sense 
as it is from its quickness of wit. 'No, my lord,' she 
says, 'I will not have you, unless I had another for 
working days: your Grace is too costly to wear every 
day.' She leaves the scene, but leaves the atmosphere of 
her affectionate gaiety behind her. It has quickened the 
wits of the Prince, and he proposes the merry labour ot 
bringing Signor Benedick and the Lady Beatrice into ' a 
mountain of affection the one for the other.' She were 
'an excellent wife for Benedick, and he is of a noble 
strain of approved valour and of confirmed honesty.' 

With this commendation, which raises Benedick into a 
higher place in our thoughts, and with a new and better 
opinion of the character of Beatrice, the scene closes. How 
slowly, how carefully Shakespeare builds up his fine 
characters ! 

Every one knows the double scene in the garden when 
Benedick and Beatrice are befooled into the seriousness of 
love. Surely, along with the befooling of Malvolio in such 
another garden of pleached alleys, arbours, and orchards 
(the gardens so resemble each other that I fancy Shake- 
speare drew them from one he knew), there is no finer or 
more delightful piece of comedy, so gay, with a touch of 
seriousness behind it; so good-natured, so graceful, and 
with so right an end in view. In order to make it more 
dramatic Benedick is seen at first alone, and declares in a 
soliloquy that freedom of his from the snares and love of 



MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING 15 

women, which the next quarter of an hour is to enslave for 
ever. He protests so much that I wonder if Shakespeare 
did not mean us to think that Beatrice had now crept into 
his imagination. For the first time he seems to think 
marriage a possibility. 

I do much wonder that one man, seeing how much another man is a 
fool when he dedicates his behaviours to love, will, after he hath laughed 
at such shallow follies in others, become the argument of his own scorn 
by falling in love : and such a man is Claudio. I have known when 
there was no music with him but the drum and fife ; and now had he 
rather hear the tabor and the pipe : I have known when he would have 
walked ten mile afoot to see a good armour ; and now will he lie ten 
nights awake, carving the fashion of a new doublet. He was wont to 
speak plain and to the purpose, like an honest man and a soldier ; and 
now is he turned orthography ; his words are a very fantastical 
banquet, — just so many strange dishes. May I be so converted, and see 
with these eyes ? I cannot tell ; I think not : I will not be sworn but 
love may transform me to an oyster ; but I '11 take my oath on it, till 
he have made an oyster of me, he shall never make me such a fool. 
One woman is fair ; yet I am well : another is wise ; yet I am well : 
another virtuous ; yet I am well : but till all graces be in one woman 
one woman shall not come in my grace. Rich she shall be, that's 
certain ; wise, or I '11 none ; virtuous, or I '11 never cheapen her ; fair, or 
I '11 never look on her ; mild, or come not near me ; noble, or not I for 
an angel ; of good discourse, an excellent musician, and her hair shall be 
of what colour it please God. Ha ! the Prince and Monsieur Love ! 
I will hide me in the arbour. 

Then — he hears of the terrible depth and passion of 
Beatrice's love for him, and it does not occur to him 
(since the white-bearded fellow speaks it) that the story is 
incredible. It is his natural vanity which deceives him so 
very easily, and perhaps his wonder — of which indeed we 
have heard — that Beatrice, alone of women, should not 
like him. His phrase 

Is 't possible ? Sits the wind in that corner ? 

is delicious. The over- stating of Beatrice's love — her 
weeping, sobbing, beating her heart, tearing her hair, 
praying, cursing — 

sweet Benedick ! God give me patience, 



16 LECTURES ON SHAKESPEARE 

makes the scene more amusing. That Beatrice should do 
this is incredible ; that Benedick should believe it (were 
not vanity unfathomable) seems still more incredible. 
His speech, when it is all over, especially the naive vanity 
of the beginning, is quite enchanting. Then, his vanity, 
which is only on the surface of this honest-hearted man, 
is forgotten in the rising of his love. He discounts all the 
mockery which will be lavished on him. What is it to 
him if he loves the woman and the woman loves him ? 
I am I, and let the world go hang. It is a delightful 
soliloquy. Here is the beginning of it — 

This can be no trick : the conference was sadly borne. They have the 
truth of this from Hero. They seem to pity the lady : it seems her 
affections have their full bent. Love me ! why, it must be requited. I 
hear how I am censured : they say I will bear myself proudly, if I per- 
ceive the love come from her : they say too, that she will rather die than 
give any sign of affection. . . . 

The same net is set for Beatrice, and the result is 
similar. But what a difference between her speech and 
that of Benedick ! There is no vanity in her words, no 
thought such as Benedick's of what others will say when 
she changes, but only repentance for her past pride and 
scorn ; none of that self-consideration of which Benedick is 
so full ; it is complete, frank giving up of herself. Shake- 
speare, having made her a little sharper, at the beginniug 
of the play, than becomes a woman in the eyes of men, now 
spreads the softness which comes of loving over the whole 
of her nature, and lifts her on to a higher level (by the 
absence in her of his vanity and self-thinking) than that 
on which he has placed Benedick. But the softness does 
not weaken her character. On the contrary, in defence of 
Hero, in wrath against Claudio, she is stronger than she 
was before. The softness has to do with herself alone. 
It casts out her self-assertiveness — an immense step to- 
wards nobility of character. Other changes in her are 



MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING 17 

made by Shakespeare, now that he has given her love. 
She has lost all her wit most curiously. She is almost too 
humble, almost out of character. Love has lowered her 
plumes. But then she has been greatly moved by finding 
out how gravely Hero and Ursula blame her pride and 
hard- hear tedness, how much they think that she has 
sacrificed loving-kindness on the altar of her wit. Hero 
has drawn her sharply — 

But Nature never framed a woman's heart 
Of prouder stuff than that of Beatrice : 
Disdain and scorn ride sparkling in her eyes, 
Misprising what they look on ; and her wit 
Values itself so highly, that to her 
All matter else seems weak : she cannot love, 
Nor take no shape nor project of affection, 
She is so self-endear'd. 

Of course, Hero is exaggerating a little in this — for her 
purpose. Beatrice is far better than that. It is her 
dancing gaiety of youth which has carried her away, and 
the pleasure of using her rapier of speech. But now that 
the centre of her is touched, we see how full and deep are 
the waters of loving-kindness there ; and we are not sur- 
prised when they surge upwards into a splendid passion 
of indignation when Hero is belied. Beatrice, like Bene- 
dick, but more fully than Benedick, is slowly and nobly 
expanded by Shakespeare in this scene. 

This is the first scene in which we begin to have a 
closer acquaintance with the ' gentle Hero.' Once before, 
in the masquerade, and emboldened by her mask, she 
interchanges a few words with Don Pedro. They are 
touched with her cousin's sharpness and wit, and I do not 
believe that, unmasked, she could have said them — 

D. Pedro. Lady, will you walk about with your friend ? 
Hero. So you walk softly, and look sweetly, and say nothing, I am 
yours for the walk ; and especially when I walk away. 
D. Pedro. With me in your company ? 
Hero. I may say so, when I please. 

B 



18 LECTURES ON SHAKESPEARE 

D. Pedro. And when please you to say so 1 

Hero. When I like your favour : for God defend the lute should 
be like the case ! 

Gaiety, it is plain, is also in her gentle soul, which, for the 
most part, is silent. When she comes in with Claudio 
and her father, and Beatrice talks of her betrothal, she 
does not say one word — a quiet maiden on the edge of 
womanhood. But here in the garden with Ursula, her 
servant and friend, she speaks at her ease with confidence 
and freedom. She is clever: her sketch of the way 
Beatrice handles men could scarcely be better done. But 
she is more than clever. Had she not loved the birds, 
she had never known how the lapwing runs, nor yet com- 
pared Beatrice to the wild hawks that haunt the cliffs — 

I know her spirits are as coy and wild 
As haggards of the rock. 

She feels what is beautiful, and makes her little 

thoughtful analogies between the nature she loves and 

the human life she knows. ' Go/ she says to Ursula, ' and 

bid Beatrice 

steal into the pleached bower, 
Where honeysuckles, ripen'd by the sun, 
Forbid the sun to enter ; like favourites, 
Made proud by princes, that advance their pride 
Against that power that bred it.' 

Now begin ; 
For look where Beatrice, like a lapwing, runs 
Close by the ground, to hear our conference. 

And Ursula, her echo, caps her mistress's simile drawn 
from nature with another of the fish that ' cut with her 
golden oars the silver stream.' 

These two have lived and thought together. The only 
other touch of Hero's character, before the painful scene 
in the church, is given when, dressing for her marriage, 
she says with regard to her dress — 

God give me joy to wear it ! for my heart is exceeding heavy ! 



MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING 19 

Her silent, sensitive nature feels, especially as she is not 
really in love, the presentiment of the coming sorrow. It 
was Shakespeare's mystic way to make characters he 
meant to be sensitive (like Romeo, Juliet, and the Queen in 
Richard II.), tremble for a moment in the shadows of the 
future. When we next meet her, trouble has come. 

Meanwhile Beatrice and Benedick have both carried 
away Cupid's arrow in their gizzard, and it infects all 
their ways and speech. They flash in wit no more ; they 
are silent, dreaming, seeking solitude. The change is 
so marked that much wit is broken upon them, and 
they themselves are so conscious of the change that they 
try to explain it by saying they are ill. 'Gallants,' 
says Benedick, 'I am not as I have been.' Then he 
explains that he has the toothache, and, mocked for that, 
is pettish with the mockers. 

Well, every one can master a grief, but he that has it. 

Beatrice is just as foolish. Her voice is so odd that Hero 
cries out — 

Why, how now ! do you speak in the sick tune ? 

' 1 am out of all other tune, methinks,' answers Beatrice, 
very sentimentally. She is as pettish as Benedick, and 
more sensitive. Even Margaret conquers her in wit. She 
cannot endure a joke about Benedick. She hurries every 
one. She too is out of sorts. 

'Tis almost five o'clock, cousin ; 'tis time you were ready. By my 
troth, I am exceeding ill : heigh-ho I 

All this double and amusing change should be made the 
most of by the actors, because it is an introduction to a 
change in the play. 

This new gravity and seriousness in the two principal 
characters, which now replaces their previous gaiety and 
brilliancy, changes the whole atmosphere of the play, and 



20 LECTURES ON SHAKESPEARE 

prepares us for the deep shadow which will soon darken 
its movement. What that shadow is we know. Don 
John has blackened the honour of Hero. Borachio, his 
bravo, talks to Margaret at her window and calls her 
Hero, and the Prince and Claudio listen and are convinced 
that Hero is a wanton. ' They will,' they cry, ' denounce 
her publickly in the church.' This is the tragic element, 
and it is black enough. But Shakespeare was not now, 
when he was writing the three comedies of which this 
was the first, in the humour to be too severely tragic. 
Therefore, it is into the very centre of the tragic part of 
the drama that he brings his audacious fun, and shoots 
on to the streets of Messina all the lumbering stupidities 
and self-conceits of the English watchmen of his time. 
He invents with parlous joy Dogberry and Verges, and 
their band of constables. He invents them with as much 
care as the rest. He gives them a whole scene to them- 
selves. He brings their boundless vanity and incapacity 
into contact with Leonato, Claudio, and the Prince, when 
these are as empty of common sense and as incapable of 
seeing the truth as the foolish constables. He brings 
their low life face to face with the ' high life ' of Messina ; 
and whatever it may think of them, Dogberry at least, 
self-idealised by his happy vanity, thinks himself as good 
as any man of Messina. Their foolery intermingles excel- 
lently with the tragedy, and in the end is used to change 
the tragic event into happiness. 

There are few parts in Shakespeare more difficult to 
act well than those of Dogberry and Verges, because the 
humour is more forced than is usual with Shakespeare. 
The miscalling of words seems carried too far, and is a 
little wearisome. The boundless stupidity of Dogberry 
is only made humorous by his boundless vanity. He is 
absolutely convinced of his intellectual greatness, of his 
capacity to handle affairs of every kind — and perfectly. 



MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING 21 

There is no question put before him by the watch which 
he does not answer with a chuckle of self-satisfaction. 
And when he is called an ass, he thinks the world is 
falling into ruin. It is, he thinks, far the most important 
event which has occurred in Messina for years, and he 
cannot get away from it. The part ought to be acted 
very well — for it is exceedingly difficult. 

Now comes the Event, the scene in the church at the 
beginning of the fourth Act — the denunciation of Hero. 
In it all the characters will be tried in the fire. It is a 
repulsive scene. The public denunciation of a woman by 
the man who comes to marry her, exposing her shame to 
the whole world, instead of a private repudiation to save, 
at least, the honour of her family, would be in our eyes a 
disgraceful act, wholly unworthy of two gentlemen like 
the Prince and Claudio. The shame it gives us to hear 
it is only saved by our knowledge of Hero's innocence, 
and by the pity which we feel for her. Our pity changes 
into indignation, and is voiced by Beatrice. But we 
never recover any admiration for the Prince and Claudio. 
It is true they saw Hero, as they thought, talking to a 
man out of a window; but if they had ever looked at 
Hero, they should have disbelieved their eyes. At least, 
they should have inquired before they condemned. Nor 
do I understand how Leonato believes in his daughter's 
guilt so easily. Fathers, it is true, do not see clearly what 
girls of sixteen are, but still — Leonato is more than 
ordinarily foolish. Beatrice is not so blind. She laughs 
the accusation to scorn, and she carries Benedick with 
her. These two emerge pure gold out of the testing. 

One has never thought much of Claudio ; he is a boy, 
with a boy's courage, weakness, fine fashion and vanity, 
quite ready to give up Hero in order to curry favour with 
the Prince. His high and mighty conduct in the church 
is the vengeance of hurt vanity. He thinks of no one 



22 LECTURES ON SHAKESPEARE 

but himself. Only his extreme youth excuses him, yet, 
even with that excuse, he earns our complete disgust ; 
and the Prince, clothed in the same shame, may walk 
away with him. The Prince was Leonato's guest; he 
had been received with honour and rich entertainment. 
Leonato was an old man, worthy of character and rank, 
Governor of the city — yet the Prince allows his favourite 
to stain with nameless shame, before the whole town, the 
daughter of his host. He is in the same ugly box with 
Claudio. His conduct is even worse, for his vanity has 
not been hurt. 

I think the ugliness of the conduct of the two men under 
this central test, and not only the ugliness but their un- 
natural discourtesy, got on Shakespeare's literary nerves, 
and caused him in this scene not to write so well as usual. 
When the subject, as in this scene, is wrongly or inade- 
quately conceived, the execution is sure to be inadequately 
or wrongly done. The artist often does not know that his 
conception of the thing is wrong till the inadequate execu- 
tion of his work tells him that something has gone astray. 
He has been unconscious till this moment of revelation that 
his original arrangement of the subject was out of truth. 
Now, he knows, but it is too late to alter the thing done. 
It must stand; and here I think it stands. Neither 
Claudio, Leonato, nor Hero speak those words which 
cannot be changed, which contain a hundredfold more 
than they seem to contain. Leonato's immediate belief 
(on the hearsay evidence of Claudio and the Prince) in 
his daughter's vile impurity is apart from nature. All he 
says about it is foolish or violent. He seems to have 
passed, almost in a moment, from a sensible man into 
senile weakness. This is more Shakespeare's fault — if I 
may put what I mean in that way — than Leonato's. The 
conception of the scene is ill-shaped and the execution of 
it is also ill-done. Then, again, Claudio's accusation, while 



MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING 23 

the girl stands before him, clad in her modesty, looking, 
as he says, ' as chaste as is the bud ere it be blown, ' is 
odiously immodest. Its savagery can only be accounted 
for by his hurt vanity. Yet, as the child looks on him, 
he seems, at the end, to half-repent, washes his words 
with tears — the wretched fool — and swears that for her 
sake he will love no more. The Prince backs him up, and 
Don John scoffs in the distance. This villain doubles his 
villainy. He knows Hero is innocent, but sacrifices the 
child only to gratify his spite against the Prince and 
Claudio. He ought to be torn asunder. I am glad he 
is taken at the last. Few things in Shakespeare are 
wickeder than his speech about Hero's wanton ways — 

Fie, fie ! they are not to be named, my lord, 
Not to be spoken of ; 
There is not chastity enough in language, 
Without offence, to utter them. Thus, pretty lady, 
I am sorry for thy much misgovernment. 

What Hero says so quietly on the accusation is in her 
character, but not quite so vitally true to her nature as I 
should have expected from Shakespeare. She seems to 
come to the verge of saying the absolutely right thing, 
but not quite to say it. Of course, she is utterly con- 
founded by the infinite distance between herself and the 
accusation, and all she says marks her maiden amazement, 
her maiden ignorance. 

' Is my lord well, that he doth speak so wide ? ' she 
whispers when she is charged with sensuality. ' This looks 
not like a nuptial, ' Benedick says. ' True, God ! ' cries 
Hero ; and the cry is good, but might be better invented. 
Better, however, is her cry, when her father joins the cate- 
chism instead of defending her: personal indignation 
begins to thrill through it — 

Hero. O, God defend me ! how am I beset ! 

What kind of catechising call you this ? 
Claud. To make you answer truly to your name. 



24 LECTURES ON SHAKESPEARE 

Hero. Is it not Hero ? Who can blot that name 

With any just reproach ? 
Claud. Marry, that can Hero ; 

Hero herself can blot out Hero's virtue. 

What man was he talk'd with you yesternight 

Out at your window, betwixt twelve and one ? 

Now, if you are a maid, answer to this. 
Hero. I talk'd with no man at that hour, my lord. 

And then, this delicate child, too gentle for these storms, 
too innocent to bear these stains, stretched suddenly on 
the very rack of shame, when she is as white as the 
curdled snow, hears her father believe in her guilt — 

Hath no man's dagger here a point for me ? 

It is the last blow. Her natural defender has abandoned 
her, and she swoons away. It is the best thing she could 
do. The Prince, Claudio, and Don John leave the church, 
and Benedick, Beatrice, Leonato, and the Friar are left on 
the ground. 

Since he is old, and weak through passionate grief for 
himself, for his daughter, and his shame, we may partly 
excuse the senile outburst with which Leonato repudiates 
his daughter, and trusts the evidence of Claudio and the 
Prince more than that of his daughter's eyes. He comes 
forth from the testing event as poorly as possible. He 
sees his daughter recover from her swoon, and look upon 
him with her innocent eyes. ' Dost thou look up ? ' he cries 
in a rage of contempt. ' Yea ; wherefore should she not ? ' 
answers that excellent Friar. He is, in Shakespeare's 
thought (who is almost always kind to Friars), a man of 
the world as well as a just churchman. He has seen too 
much of men and women in hours of trouble, when 
innocence was hurt, when guilt was suddenly revealed, 
not to know at once that Hero is without stain ; that there 
has been a shameful mistake. He comes nobly out of the 
test — wise, affectionate, tolerant — the master of the situa- 
tion. He has noted the lady, and marked 



MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING 25 

A thousand blushing apparitions 

To start into her face ; a thousand innocent shames 

In angel whiteness beat away those blushes ; 

And in her eye there hath appear'd a fire, 

To burn the errors that these princes hold 

Against her maiden truth. 

Pity her father could not see with those eyes ! He re- 
iterates his accusation, blinded by selfish thoughts of his 
own dishonour. Not till Benedick suggests that Don 
John may have tooled this treachery, does his fatherhood, 
still blustering, rise above his selfishness, and swear to 
vindicate his daughter. Then the Friar proposes that 
Hero should die till her honour is cleared. Dead, she will 
be regretted, even were the accusation true. Claudio will 
repent with all his heart — and the lines he tells of this 
are too lovely and too wise not to quote — 

When he shall hear she died upon his words, 
The idea of her life shall sweetly creep 
Into his study of imagination ; 
And every lovely organ of her life 
Shall come apparelM in more precious habit, 
More moving-delicate, and full of life, 
Into the eye and prospect of his soul, 
Than when she lived indeed. 

So, his advice is taken. Hero, Leonato, and the Friar leave, 
and Benedick and Beatrice are left alone. These two, in 
the day of trial, are equal to it, and above it. Shakespeare 
lifts them, in this hour of passion, to the highest point of 
their characters, above all that others knew of them, above 
all they knew of themselves. They had not been deceived 
into belief in Hero's shame. Benedick, though he loves 
the Prince and Claudio, does not join himself to them. 
He is at first silent — a grave man when the affair is grave. 
Then he speaks his astonishment. 

For my part, I am so attir'd in wonder 
I know not what to say. 

He supports the Friar, but yet is faithful to friendship ; 



26 LECTURES ON SHAKESPEARE 

not quick to change, a man to be trusted ! And then he 
pledges his honour to deal justly with the whole matter. 
Beatrice is lucky ; she has found a man. 

Signior Leonato, let the Friar advise you : 
And though you know my inwardness and love 
Is very much unto the Prince and Claudio, 
Yet, by mine honour, I will deal in this 
As secretly and justly as your soul 
Should with your body. 

Now comes that delightful dialogue between these two 
who have not yet revealed their mutual love. It is a 
mingled strain of love and of indignation. In Benedick 
the love is greatest, in Beatrice the indignation, and 
Beatrice (as swift in wrath as she was in wit) makes 
the avenging of Hero the price of her love. All the deep 
affection of her nature has been stirred ; we have got down 
to the central depth of the woman — to an infinite pity, 
to wrath for another's wrong, and fire of love. And this, 
which is for Hero, creates in her an atmosphere of passion 
in which her love for Benedick, which has, as yet, only 
been requital of his, rises into personal passion for him ; 
and that, in its turn, swells her indignation into a fury ot 
righteous wrath. This beating to and fro of two passions, 
each increasing the power of the other, and the transfer- 
ence of the intensity of both to Benedick who has been 
already thrilled by the air of passion which breathes from 
Beatrice, is a noble piece of drama. Their talk is like 
the alternate strokes on the anvil of two fierce hammers 
plied at lightning speed. The dialogue dwells first on 
Hero's wrong, then on love, then on what a man who 
loved might do for the woman he loved. 

Bene. Come, bid me do anything for thee. 
Beat. Kill Claudio. 

They are not intelligent who say that is unwomanly. 
It is of a woman's very essence. It is the outbreak of a 



MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING 27 

thousand sorrows, feelings, wraths, tears, agonies of indig- 
nation, which have surged and collected within Beatrice 
since Claudio denounced her cousin. How, the moment 
she had sympathy, could she have avoided it ! It was the 
inmost wrath of her womanhood, and once it began to 
move, it went on, completing its indignant circle. Bene- 
dick saw thus to the fiery heart of the woman, and it was 
well for him. Great reverence and honour must have 
been added to his love. Nor was he unworthy of it. His 
answer to her cry ' Kill Claudio,' shows how strong the 
man was. His friendship is not mastered by his love, till 
he is securely convinced that Claudio has wronged Hero. 
' Kill Claudio,' she cries — 

Bene. Ha ! not for the wide world. 

Beat. You kill me to deny it. Farewell. 

Bene. Tarry, sweet Beatrice. 

Beat. I am gone, though I am here : there is no love in you : nay, 
I pray you, let me go. 

Bene. Beatrice, — 

Beat. In faith, I will go. 

Bene. We '11 be friends first. 

Beat. You dare easier be friends with me than fight with mine 
enemy. 

Bene. Is Claudio thine enemy ? 

Beat. Is he not approved in the height a villain, that hath slan- 
dered, scorned, dishonoured my kinswoman ? O that I were a man ! 
What, bear her in hand until they come to take hands ; and then, with 
public accusation, uncovered slander, unmitigated rancour, — God, that 
I were a man ! I would eat his heart in the market-place. 

The last phrase is as fierce as fierceness itself. All 
that she says afterwards is weaker, and might well have 
been omitted. It lowers the pitch. The phrase itself 
seems too terrible for a woman to use. But Beatrice was 
of that type of woman who, at the top of indignation not 
for her own but for another's wrong, and in the thrilling 
atmosphere of love, would say anything to express and 
expand her heart. Of course, she would not have done 
it. It may be spoken, not accomplished. 



28 LECTURES ON SHAKESPEARE 

Some have even said it would be impossible even for a 
man. But that is not so when men are maddened, in 
days of terror and vengeance. I wonder where Shake- 
speare found the thought. He uses it again in another 
way when Aufidius declares his hatred to Coriolanus : 

Where I find him, were it 
At home, upon my brother's guard, even there, 
Against the hosjDitable canon, would I 
Wash my fierce hand in 's heart. 

Did he know of such a deed ? I have heard the story told. 
In the French Revolution, during the days of the 
September massacres, a tall man, holding his left hand in 
his breast, entered a cabaret and called for a large cup of 
wine. He drew his hand out of his blouse, and in it was 
a heart dropping blood. Holding it high, he squeezed it 
till the blood streamed into the wine-cup. And with a 
cry he drank. It was the heart of his enemy, his 
daughter's ravisher. 

It is terrible to hear of it. It must have been terrible 
for Benedick to hear it spoken by the woman he loved. 
It is no wonder that he grew serious and spoke with a 
man's gravity. He too, like Beatrice, in these grave 
affairs, shows the steadfast centre of his soul. 

Bene. Think you in your soul the Count Claudio hath wronged 
Hero? 

Beat. Yea, as sure as I have a thought or a soul. 

Bene. Enough ! I am engaged : I will challenge him. I will kiss 
your hand, and so leave you. By this hand, Claudio shall render me 
a dear account. As you hear of me, so think of me. Go, comfort your 
cousin : I must say she is dead : and so, farewell. 

When he meets the Prince and Claudio, he goes straight 
to the point. They joke with him about Leonato's anger. 
' There 's no true valour/ he answers well, ' in a false 
quarrel.' He tells Claudio he is a villain who has killed 
a sweet lady. He tells the Prince that he must dis- 
continue his company. He too has been guilty of Hero's 



MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING 29 

death, and he leaves them confounded with his earnest- 
ness. He, except the Friar, is the only worthy man of 
the whole lot, and he, like Beatrice, comes out of the 
crisis pure gold. 

No one acted this noble character better than he whose 
loss we all deplore; better than Sir Henry Irving. It 
suited his genius exactly. It suited his figure, his face, 
his natural manner, and his nature. Benedick and he 
were one, and it was a great delight to see him play his 
part with Ellen Terry, whose grace, intelligence, and 
passion made her Beatrice the very image in mind and 
body of Shakespeare's heroine. Irving was always nearer 
to the seventeenth century than the nineteenth. He was 
Italian in that the courtier and the soldier of that time 
were combined in him. He had the manner also of that 
time. And in his chivalric sense of honour, in a certain 
restraint of passion, in his lovableness, in the swiftness 
of rush into deep feeling, in his courtly carriage towards 
men, and much more to women, in his intellectual 
power (for even when one did not agree with his reading 
of a character, one was conscious of the intellectual power 
with which he had studied and conceived it), in all these 
points and in more also — points of noble character, happily 
inherent in his own nature, and also inherent in Benedick — 
he was the best Benedick on the modern stage. I do not 
think at any time the part could have been better acted. 
He was what Shakespeare meant. 

And now these two fine creatures, having discovered 
one another in this tempest of fateful sorrow, having seen 
the serious foundation of their characters, and having 
passed beyond the trouble better than they entered into 
it, return to their brightness and gaiety ; take up again 
the weapons of their wit, play with the world and with 
one another, and admire, because they love, each the 
other's cleverness. The closing scene, where they both 



30 LECTURES ON SHAKESPEARE 

pretend not to care for one another, is excellent comedy. 
Both are delighted with life, and in full enjoyment of 
all things. And Benedick has become through love so 
young, so happy, so inspired by honest pleasure, that he 
will not allow anything in the world to interfere with his 
dancing out his joy — not supper, not even the punish- 
ment of Don John. And he sweeps round, with gay 
audacity, upon the Prince who attempts to mock him. 

D. Pedro. How dost thou, Benedick, the married man ? 

Bene. 1 11 tell thee "what, Prince ; a college of wit-crackers cannot 
flout me out of my humour. Dost thou think I care for a satire, or an 
epigram ? No ; if a man will be beaten with brains, he shall wear 
nothing handsome about him. In brief, since I do purpose to 
marry, I will think nothing to any purpose that the world can say 
against it ; and therefore never flout at me for what I have said against 
it ; for man is a giddy thing, and this is my conclusion. . . . 

Prince, thou art sad ; get thee a wife, get thee a wife. . . . Strike up, 
pipers ! 

There is no need to speak further of the fifth Act. The 
discovery of the villainy of Don John is made by Dog- 
berry. What cunning envy has tied, stupidity unties. 
The universe is on the side of innocence in this play. 
When Shakespeare drew Cordelia, Desdemona, Ophelia, 
the universe did not take that side. What a pity, what a 
serious thing it is, that we do not know why it changes so ! 



II 

TWELFTH NIGHT ; OB, WHAT YOU WILL 

Twelfth Night, or What, You Will (acted by Shake- 
speare's company before the Court, about Christmastide 
in 1601-2), probably owed its first name to the fact of 
its being acted as the Twelfth Night performance of that 
year. Moreover, John Manningham, a member of the 
Middle Temple from 1601 to 1603, records in his diary, 
February 2, 1601-2, that he saw it acted on that day in 
the Hall of the Middle Temple. We may then fairly date 
its composition, 1601. Then also the allusion in the third 
Act to the new map, with the augmentation of the Indies, 
enables us to say that it must have been written after 
1599 or 1600, for that map was first issued in Hakluyt's 
Voyages, published in one or other of those years. 

Its second title, What You Will, is a piece of Shake- 
speare's gaiety ; and all I have said about the title As You 
Like It may apply to this title. The play is a varied 
picture of human nature, ranging from the highest to the 
lowest in rank, from the wisest to the most foolish — a 
delightful, broken landscape of the world of men and 
women, full of love and laughter, fancy and imagination. 
We may take out of it what we will, leave aside what we 
will, wander in it where we will. Shakespeare made it 
for his own pleasure in humanity, and for our pleasure. 
When he had finished it he was pleased. He had 
fulfilled his will. Then he smiled to himself and said, 
'It is mine no longer. I give it to the audience; let 
them have their will with it.' And its readers and the 

31 



32 LECTURES ON SHAKESPEARE 

playgoers of the world have always willed to have it. It 
has kept the stage for three hundred years, and it is as 
fresh and as delightful to-day as it was of old. Yiola, 
Malvolio, the Duke, Sir Toby Belch, Maria, have been the 
favourite parts of excellent actors and actresses. Even in 
the inferior parts a reputation can be made. Shakespeare, 
who felt with actors, took wonderful pains to give plenty 
of attractive work to all the members of his company, to 
give to the smallest acting-part points to be made which 
should draw the attention and the praise of the audience 
— a different view of his duty from that which prevails 
among the dramatists who write chiefly for the Stars and 
neglect the minor personages. 

This play was written about the same time as Julius 
Caesar, perhaps at the same time. It is not improbable that 
Shakespeare, like many a great artist in music or painting, 
had two subj ects of a different spirit and conception on hand 
at the same time. And when he was tired of the graver 
or the gayer subject, he sought that which was opposite 
to that on which he had been at work. He changed the 
climate of his imagination, and so kept it in health. 

It illustrates not only the range of his genius, but also 
the easy power with which it worked, that he could pass 
in a moment from the atmosphere of Twelfth Night to 
that of Julius Ccesar, from the pleasure-loving Duke to 
the Stoic Brutus, from the delicate pain of Yiola to the 
restless sorrow of Portia. As I think of it, it seems quite 
wonderful. We change from a world full of graceful 
gaiety and fantastic mirth, of broad and honest humour, 
of love at play, of music and song, to weighty State affairs, 
to a world where two universal ideas of government are 
in a death-grapple. We pass from the fleeting court of 
a provincial Duke, and the palace of a lady of fashion in 
a far-off corner of Illyria, to the Forum and the Capitol of 
'great and glorious Rome.' Yet Shakespeare's mastery 



TWELFTH NIGHT 33 

over this small, secluded circle of events is as finished as 
his mastery over the huge events which transformed the 
government of the known world. 

No play is more exclusively, more fantastically gay. 
Were it not for a few passages in which the depths of 
human nature are sounded, it would seem to be the out- 
breaking of a young man's fancy and jollity. It touches 
alike the most delicate fantasies of love, and the most 
honest breadth of jovial humour. Not a trace of tragedy, 
of the deep sorrows of the world, is to be found in 
it. And this is curious, for it is the last of the early 
comedies, the last in which for many years the rooted 
happiness and brightness of Shakespeare's soul appeared. 

Some speak of its ' romantic pathos,' of its sadness, as 
relieved by the broad comedy of the lower characters. I 
can trace no real sadness in it at all. It is like a dance on 
some festal day in an old Italian garden. The ladies and 
the courtly wooers move in stately, graceful measures on 
the grass ; where now and then, to vary the pleasurable 
day, their retainers, masked like nymphs, satyrs, fauns, 
jesters, singers (and one whom they mock), might dance 
with delight an interlude, while the statelier company 
look on. And the sun shines, and the air is clear. 

The play goes trippingly from the beginning to the 
end. It is romantic enough, not the real romantic ; 
a sort of Renaissance-romantic like the introduction to 
the Decameron. When it touches sadness, it is not sad 
seriously. The sadness of the Duke is the same kind of 
sadness which Romeo had when he was in love with Rosa- 
line, a sadness which is happiness; it is joy in the attire 
of mourning, youth dramatising the slight monotony of 
its radiant life by inventing sorrow which is not sorrow, 
but a fresh way of feeling life. Had his love-sadness 
been real, he had never changed so easily from Olivia to 
Viola. He thinks it real, of course; every young man 

c 



34 LECTURES ON SHAKESPEARE 

does. Did he not think it real, it would give him no 
pleasure, and it is the pleasure of it that he likes. It is 
a game of his youth, a dance of graceful feelings in a 
rose-garden of his soul. 

Viola is no more sad than the Duke. She cherishes, 
like many a young girl, her hours when she clothes the 
world and life in dainty grey — sweet imaginings of sorrow 
on the edge of joy, aromatic pains, momentary despairs, 
uprushings of passion which, while they flush her being, 
live on the fine edge which divides pleasure from pain. 
In one of these she speaks herself to the man she loves, 
and yet, being garmented like a man, does not betray 
herself. A great consolation to give her passing sorrow 
words, and not offend her womanhood ! Once she has 
spoken, her flying sadness vanishes away. And indeed 
she had no right to be sad. She was having a most 
enchanting time. She was in love, and at her age even 
what seem its miseries are more delightful than maturer 
pleasures. And the flying miseries were well compensated 
by the joys of her life. She was always with the man 
she loved. He disclosed his whole heart to her. She 
was his most trusted companion. She learnt to know 
his nature and character to their recesses. She knew 
him as a man knows a man, and as a woman knows a 
man — a parlous knowledge. That he was in love with 
Olivia was of course disagreeable. But I do not think 
she was ever afraid of that love reaching its end. She 
loved so well herself that she must have detected the 
root-unreality in the Duke's love. Then she knew Olivia 
did not care for him, and before long she knew this with 
certainty, because Olivia fell in love with her. When 
that took place, she was sure that victory was in her 
hands. And she (as we well see from all her talks with 
Olivia, in which she plays every kind of game with the 
circumstances) enjoyed with the ardent coquetry of 



TWELFTH NIGHT 35 

youth the amusement of the situation. She was not at 
all sad, nor had she any right to be sad. 

Olivia is not sad either. She has her own will and 
way completely. When is a woman sad under these cir- 
cumstances ? As to the others, Sir Andrew and Toby 
Belch, Feste, Maria, Fabian, — they are on the top of 
mirth and jollity. Even Malvolio, till he is made a gull 
of, is quite happy in his self-conceit ; and if he loses his 
happiness, he is the cause, in its loss, of vast amusement 
to others. Sebastian reaches the peak of joy ; and 
though Antonio and the Captain, who are the most 
unselfish of all the characters, suffer for it, yet we know 
at the end that they emerge into peace and pleasure. 

No; the play is brimming over with the delight of 
youth, with mirth of every kind, with stately pleasure, 
with the prankfulness of love, with effervescent life. 
The whole spirit of it is in this verse : 

What is love 1 'tis not hereafter : 
Present mirth hath present laughter ; 

What 's to come is still unsure : 
In delay there lies no plenty ; 
Then come kiss me, sweet and twenty, 

Youth 's a stuff will not endure. 

This spirit was deliberately wrought into the whole play 
by Shakespeare. He might have made a more serious 
comedy out of the story which was the original of the 
play — the History of Apolonius and Silla — a story half 
sad ; romantically sad. But he did not choose to do that, 
but to make it mirthful and joyful. And the proof of that 
is, that he invented Malvolio, Sir Toby and Sir Andrew, 
Maria, Fabian, and the Clown, not one of whom appears 
in the original novel by Bandello from which The History 
of Apolonius and Silla was derived. He poured (out of 
his own desire to laugh and be happy) a flood of gay and 
jovial humour into the story. Sir Toby Belch is like a 
resuscitation of Falstaff, with a tenth of FalstafT's intelli- 



36 LECTURES ON SHAKESPEARE 

gence and wit, and none of his heart. He and Maria seem 
to live for nothing but fun, and for making fun of fools. 
Aguecheek is even more their butt than Malvolio. He is 
their continual entertainment, and, in his infinite conceit 
of himself, he is his own entertainment. Malvolio is made 
a fountain of fun. The whole underaction is of a reckless 
gaiety. 

When we think of the plays that followed, this is very 
curious. This play is the last of the joyous comedies — 
like a farewell to mirth. Never again is Shakespeare the 
same. And it is an abrupt farewell: Twelfth Night is 
followed immediately by Julius Ccesar, within the year — 
a play dealing with great political issues, with tragic 
workings of the soul. But such work was not unknown 
before to Shakespeare. Richard III. and Richard II. 
are as tragic, though the issues were not, as those of 
Csesar, world-wide. By itself Julius Co&sar does not 
prove that the temper of Shakespeare's soul had changed. 
In the old days it might have been followed by some 
lively comedy of youth and love. Now it is different. 
It is followed by a series of solemn, weighty, terrible, 
unrelieved tragedies in which (with matured and awful 
power of thought, imagination, and execution) he goes 
down into the incommunicable deeps of sin and sorrow 
and sacred passion. The temper of his soul has changed, 
but why, we may conjecture, but we cannot tell. It is 
enough to say that Twelfth Night is a dividing line 
in Shakespeare's development both as an artist and a 
man. The sunlight of this play shines no more for 
years ; storm and darkness follow, horror and pain. 

The scenery of the play is less defined than it is in 
other plays. It is of a city in Illyria, close to the sea- 
coast, with woods and hills towards the inland among 
which the Duke hunted. The city is large, with suburbs 
where the hostels chiefly are ; the streets, where some of 



TWELFTH NIGHT 37 

the scenes take place, are wide ; and the secluded villas, 
with full gardens, have gates which open into the streets 
and into the woods in their rear. The town has been 
long established. It is full of 'memorials and famous 
things ' which adorn it and are visited by travellers. 

Two places are chiefly occupied by scenes in the play — 
the Duke's palace among sweet beds of flowers and woods, 
and Olivia's house and garden. Olivia's house is large. 
It lodges many retainers ; and Malvolio, its steward, has 
much to do. The garden has wide walks and box- tree 
alleys, and at the bottom of it there is a large orcfiiard, 
where the duel is to take place between Viola and Sir 
Andrew. Two other slight scenes are laid on the 
neighbouring sea- coast after a violent storm in which 
Sebastian and Viola are shipwrecked. The waves are 
still seen thundering on the beach. This is the scenery 
of the piece. 

The plot is very slight and the subject thin. In order 
to make it into a larger and more various representation 
of human life, Shakespeare invented an underplot, also 
a slight one, which might be called The Mocking of 
Malvolio. This fills up all the previously uninhabited 
portions of the main subject, and fills them with as un- 
sentimental an assemblage of folk as the folk in the Upper 
plot are sentimental. The sentimental elements and the 
unsentimental make a livelier, more dramatic impression 
from their contrast; and the contrast itself makes the 
dancing life of the play more interesting to an audience. 
It affords great opportunities for that variety of act and 
incident which, when a dramatist gives it us, delights us 
most. Each hearer finds something to yield him pleasure. 
There is plenty in the play to interest men and women of 
a refined and idle society, and plenty more to amuse men 
and women of a coarser type; and as for the idealist 
and the dreaming lover — they have food enough and to 



38 LECTURES ON SHAKESPEARE 

spare. Music and love and high courtesies interchanged 
in courtly gardens, are interlaced with drinking and jollity 
and practical jokes and a riot of laughter. 

Yet, though there are these two sides of life in the 
play, there is really only one class of society represented. 
This is the rich, aristocratic class, who have nothing to do 
but hunt and sing, dress and make love, and now and 
then to go to war ; who have an agreeable surface cultiva- 
tion, a pleasure in music and poetry and beautiful things ; 
and who (for it is Shakespeare who writes) have good 
manners, honest and honourable souls, and the habit of 
yielding to impulse. This is the class who have retainers 
and flatterers, and persons who live upon them. These 
also have nothing to do but to amuse themselves ; and 
they use their patrons for that purpose — folk like Sir 
Toby Belch, Fabian, Feste, Maria, even Malvolio. How- 
ever different these are from the upper class, they form 
a necessary outskirt of the same society. The society 
of the play is then one society; and Shakespeare must 
have seen plenty of it in the houses of his friends — 
Southampton, Pembroke, Essex, and the rest. The Duke, 
with his musical and literary tastes, and his high sense 
of honour, may well have been the image of one of the 
young nobles of the time. Olivia, too, is drawn from the 
life ; so, probably, is Malvolio. 

The play opens with the Duke among his lords and 
musicians, and full of his love for Olivia, who refuses to 
see him. For seven years she will encloister herself — so 
very resolute does the boredom of the Duke's wooing 
make this young woman, who, in a fortnight or so, is 
wildly in love with Cesario. This is enough to make us 
understand that the drama is to be one of those in which 
Love is the prank-player of the world. And, indeed, the 
first speech of the Duke strikes this dominant note of the 



TWELFTH NIGHT 39 

play. The spirit of Love in him calls for music to feed 
his passion : 

If music be the food of love, play on ; 

but the roving imaginations of his love soon exhaust 
that food, and he asks for more of another kind. For 
Love is greater than its means, devours them all, and 
calls for impossible satisfaction. This is Cupid in his 
cruelty, as Shakespeare often represents him, as Spenser 
drew him — Cupid in his freakishness, half a child, half a 
god, who makes his victims in this play — victims who love 
the game yet suffer in it — now kind, now cruel, hoping, 
despairing, accepting, refusing, yielding, repelling, fanciful, 
and serious ; who plays, as with toys, with Olivia, Sebas- 
tian, Viola, the Duke, even Malvolio ; who turns upside 
down the best-assorted plans, just as his lordship for the 

moment wills — 

So full of shapes is fancy, 
That it alone is high fantastical. 

The Duke is like Sir Philip Sidney, or one of that 
Elizabethan type. His youth, we are told, is ' fresh and 
stainless, free, learned and valiant.' He is a great lover of 
music, and of the best kind ; of old, antique and simple 

melodies, not the 

light airs, and recollected terms 
Of these most brisk and giddy-paced times : 

0, fellow, come, the song we had last night. 

Mark it, Cesario, it is old and plain : 

The spinsters and the knitters in the sun 

And the free maids that weave their thread with bones 

Do use to chant it : it is silly sooth, 

And dallies with the innocence of love, 

Like the old age. 

This is a delightful person, who loved the right things, 
and for the right reasons. Then he is careless of self- 
interest, loves Olivia not for her money, but because she 
' attracts his soul ' ; that is, he is in love with his own 



40 LECTURES ON SHAKESPEARE 

ideal of a woman which he has embodied in her. He 
knows nothing really of Olivia. Hence, at the close of the 
play, it is so easy for him to love Viola, whom he has 
known through and through in long companionship. 

In all the imaginations of an imagined love, he is just 
like Romeo in love with Rosaline before he met Juliet. 
It is a fantasy of passion that he feels, not passion itself. 
Like Romeo, he seeks solitude — 

I myself am best, ■when least in company. 

Like Romeo, he unlades his heart in words to Curio, even 
in the hearing of his court. When Viola joins him, he 
1 unclasps to her,' whom he thinks a youth, ' the book 
even of his secret soul.' 

The deeper passions are not like this. They are surface- 
smooth and still, like profound waters. Music, to which 
the Duke, with his love of beauty, is always flying for 
solace, does not relieve the greater passions, but disturbs 
them into storm. 

The Duke's love is love in idleness ; and he is always 
discussing it, and holding it in different lights, feeling it 
in different ways and surroundings, and seems always as 
if he were at play with it. Once, however (Sc. iv. Act 2), 
he is in his love-talk more serious than elsewhere. He 
compares the love of men and women ; but first, with a 
dim consciousness that he has talked and acted too 
fancifully for real love, he defends himself — 

For such as I am all true lovers are, 
Unstaid and skittish in all motions else, 
Save in the constant image of the creature 
That is beloved. 

After this, he grows more and more serious. Let the 
woman take, he says, a husband elder than herself; for 
men's fancies are more giddy and unfirm, more longing, 
wavering, sooner lost and worn than women's are. Let 
the man have passed by the changing times of youth, lest, 



TWELFTH NIGHT 41 

when a woman has given all and is constant, she find the 
man weary. Such is his grave view when he looks beyond 
himself. When his own love is in question, he takes 
a directly opposite view, quite forgetting, and this is in 
harmony with his character as a young man, his pre- 
vious view. A man, like himself, is embodied constancy, 
big with immortal love. As to women, whom he has 
just praised for giving all and not wearying, ' they lack 
retention — their love may be called appetite that suffers 
cloying, surfeit and revolt. ' 

Make no compare 
[ Between that love a woman can bear me 
And that I owe Olivia. 
Vio. * Ay, but I know, — 

Duke. What dost thou know ? 
Vio. Too well what love women to men may owe : 
In faith, they are as true of heart as we. 

That is, as men. All this (though the Duke does fly 
from side to side of opinion) is quite serious in him, much 
more so than elsewhere. And I think that Shakespeare, 
in the piercing of his genius, makes the Duke feel uncon- 
sciously more grave, and be higher in feeling, because at 
the moment he is wrapt in the atmosphere of Viola's 
profound passion. The song he asks for is not light or 
gay, but serious as death itself — 

Come away, come away, death. 

The Duke's liking for this black-edged kind of thing is 
also quite in character. It belongs to sentimental youth, 
when thwarted in love, to exaggerate the fanciful sorrow 
and imagine itself in the arms of death ; to put all Nature 
into mourning, and in dainty grief to linger round the 
grave it has, in melancholy imaginations, dug for itself. 
But all the time he knows that there is not the remotest 
chance that his youth will ever occupy it. A young man 
has far too much pleasure in thinking about the grave, to 
induce him to destroy the pleasure of thinking of it by a 



42 LECTURES ON SHAKESPEARE 

death which will quench all thinking. And the Duke, 
having indulged in the emotion of the song, passes on to 
another phase of feeling. It is otherwise with Viola. The 
song or the tune of it, falling into Viola's heart, which is 
filled to the very brim with the waters of true love, makes 
on her a profound impression. 

How dost thou like this tune 1 

asks the Duke ; and Viola answers — 

It gives a very echo to the seat 
Where love is throned. 

And the note of true passion in her voice surprises the 
Duke. ' Thou dost speak masterly,' he says. In all his 
fine speeches he has not reached that thrilling tone. 

Thus is built up by Shakespeare this delightful young 
man, who having nothing to do, falls into a phantasy of 
love. He is a much more worthy person than we should 
imagine him from this sentimental dallying with love. 
We remember the Captain's character of him and of 
Olivia. And at the end of the play, when he finds that 
his love for Olivia is put to confusion, he behaves 
admirably, like an honourable gentleman who rules 
himself, and is fit to rule others. 

Over against his half-imagined love is set the real love 
of Viola — over against the youth who is scarcely yet a 
man, Viola, whom love has lifted in a few days out of 
girlhood into womanhood. She has all the wisdom which 
is learnt not from outward experience which for the most 
part darkens wisdom, but from the waters of the soul 
being moved to their unfathomable bed and throughout 
every atom of them, by the pervasive spirit of true love. 
In the extremely difficult position she is in towards the 
Duke and Olivia, she never makes a mistake. All she says 
is not only to the point of the moment, but is also a help 
for her in the future. She does not calculate this, but 



TWELFTH NIGHT 43 

does it unconsciously ; and her boldness in confession of 
love, which might by some be thought unwomanly, is 
excused by her being disguised as a man. There is 
indeed a frankness in her love, even when she is known 
as a woman, which becomes her well; and which arises 
not only from the truthfulness of her nature, but also 
from the fulness of her passion. Almost every young 
woman in Shakespeare's work has this frankness, this 
open, unmincing confession of love, when love has touched 
them home. They are not ashamed of it ; it is their glory 
and their joy. Why, they think, if love is the root, the 
fountain, the all-present fire of their life, should they not 
confess it ? Why not, indeed ? No one, no man at least, 
thinks Juliet, or Miranda, or Viola, or Rosalind, or Portia, 
or Hermia immodest. On the very contrary ! Their 
confession sounds the depths of modesty; and all the 
enchantment of modesty is let loose by it. 

In this play, then, which is concerned, like others, with 
different forms of love, Viola is the image of deep, true, 
and imaginative love — love as a passion, not only of 
the senses, but of the intellect and the soul. When we 
meet her first, she is not in love ; but her native tender- 
ness, so full afterwards when she is in love, appears when 
she speaks of her brother whom she believes to be drowned 
in the storm from which she has escaped. And in her 
little tender phrase there is hidden the imagination which 
makes hereafter her words so full of grace. I cannot 
explain why there is so much of her and of her lovely 
turn of thought in these first few words — but so it is — 

This is Illyria, lady, 
says the Captain. 

Vio. And what should I do in Illyria ? 
My brother he is in Elysium. 

Tenderness, loneliness, imagination, meet in the words ; 
and as her tenderness increases afterwards, so also does 



U LECTURES ON SHAKESPEARE 

her imagination expand with it. Whenever love moves 
her deeply, as when she speaks of herself as of a sister 
who never told her love, every little phrase is full of the 
imagination which pierces to the heart of the subject on 
which she dwells. And this is constant in her character. 
Then, having given two lines to mark these elements 
in her, Shakespeare opens to us her clear common-sense, 
her quick intelligence, choosing, after inquiry into all the 
circumstances, the best thing to do. No one can be more 
practical, an element in character which is, more often 
than foolish persons think, the active comrade of the pure 
imagination. This practical intelligence in her, its 
quickness and insight, makes her just the person to 
manage the two difficult positions in which she is after- 
wards placed — her position with regard to the Duke, 
and also to Olivia. And admirably she manages both. 
Moreover, in this first talk with the Captain, we touch a 
vein of sententious thought in her, as if she had reflected 
much on life and men — 

There is a fair behaviour in thee, captain ; 
And though that nature with a beauteous wall 
Doth oft close in pollution, yet of thee 
I will believe thou hast a mind that suits 
With this thy fair and outward character. 

The same kind of sententiousness — side thoughts on life, 
records of contemplation — appears at least twice after- 
wards ; once, when she finds out that Olivia loves her 
as if she were a man, 

Disguise, I see, thou art a wickedness, 
Wherein the pregnant enemy does much. 

again, when she says of Antonio, 

Methinks his words do from such passion fly, 
That he believes himself : 

and again, full of experienced thoughtfulness, strange in 



TWELFTH NIGHT 45 

a young girl, when she broods over the conversation she 

has had with the fool : 

This fellow is wise enough to play the fool ; 

And to do that well craves a kind of wit : 

He must observe their mood on whom he jests, 

The quality of persons, and the time, 

And, like the haggard, check at every feather 

That comes before his eye. This is a practice 

As full of labour as a wise man's art : 

For folly that he wisely shows is fit ; 

But wise men, folly-falPn, quite taint their wit. 

Jaques could not have put the whole matter more con- 
cisely or truly in one of his soliloquies than this slender 
girl has done. 

When we meet Viola next, she is established at the 
court as the Duke's page, dressed as a man, and in love 
with the Duke who is in love with Olivia, and who sends 
Viola to be his ambassador to Olivia — a situation as 
amusing to an audience as it is puzzling and troublesome 
to Viola. 

The situation is contained in the first thing she says. 

She wants to know from Valentine if the Duke is 

inconstant. She hopes he is not of an inconstant 

nature (at least, so I think Shakespeare read her 

thoughts), for she would have his love, yet she must also 

hope that he will not be constant, for she would have 

him out of love with Olivia. This is a troublous riddle 

for her to solve. The riddle is doubled when she finds 

out that Olivia is in love with herself, with a woman. 

It is no wonder Viola, with her good sense, refuses to 

worry about it all, and throws the solution into the 

hands of time. 

time ! thou must untangle this, not I ; 
It is too hard a knot for me to untie ! 

That first conversation with Olivia, how clever, how 
elusive, how leading and misleading it is, and how mock- 
ingly it begins. Moreover, it is full of gaiety, of Viola's 



46 LECTURES ON SHAKESPEARE 

enjoyment with her task, and with the situation. As I 
said, it is quite a mistake to think that Shakespeare did 
not mean Yiola to have all the natural liveliness of her 
youth. In spite of her love, and the cross circumstances 
of her position, she cannot help playing with the oddness 
of the affair. She feels all its humour. 

I am the man : if it be so, as 'tis, 

Poor lady, she "were better love a dream. 

What thriftless sighs shall poor Olivia breathe ! 

And I am sure she laughed. Yet, when her love, or 
anything which has to do with true love, is touched, the 
seriousness of her passion speaks. One little phrase 
marks this. ' Are you a comedian ? ' asks Olivia. ' No, my 
profound heart/ answers Viola in a kind of aside. The 
phrase is almost torn out of her by the passion under- 
neath. Then she gaily answers the question. Then, 
again in this talk, her love leaps out unconsciously. 

My lord and master loves you : 0, such love 

Could be but recompensed, though you were crown'd 

The nonpareil of beauty ! 

There is no sense in your denial of his love. I could not, 
were I the Duke, understand it. 

1 Why, what would you do ? ' cries Olivia, who by this 
time has caught the infection of love from Viola. Then 
Viola's imagination breaks into speech, her secret love 
impassionating her words : I would 

Make me a willow cabin at your gate, 
And call upon my soul within the house ; 
Write loyal cantons of contemned love 
And sing them loud even in the dead of night ; 
Halloo your name to the reverberate hills, 
And make the babbling gossip of the air 
Cry out, ' Olivia ! ' 0, you should not rest 
Between the elements of air and earth, 
But you should pity me ! 

It is no wonder that the passion in the words, fired by 



TWELFTH NIGHT 47 

her own love for the Duke, finishes Olivia. She is swept 

in a moment into love. 'You might do much,' she 

answers. 

The atmosphere of love is round all that Viola is ; and 

it creates love in whomsoever it touches. It infects 

Olivia. It has already infected the Duke. He loves 

Cesario ; he needs only one touch of circumstance to 

love Viola. ' With an invisible and noble stealth/ she 

creeps into the study of his imagination, even while 

he woos Olivia. Then comes that charming, delicate, 

graceful conversation with the Duke, as delightful as 

dramatic to the audience, who know that Viola is 

talking of herself, while he thinks she is of his own sex ; 

in which Viola, while disclosing her love in every word, 

is of an exquisite tenderness and modesty — one of the 

quite lovely visions which Shakespeare had of a woman's 

heart. Every moment Viola is on the edge of forgetting 

she is a man. When the Duke says — 

For women are as roses, whose fair flower 
Being once display'd, doth fall that very hour. 

the woman in Viola leaps forth — 

And so they are : alas, that they are so ; 
To die, even when they to perfection grow ! 

It must have been only his preoccupation with Olivia which, 
when he heard that, shut the Duke's eyes to the fact 
that his page was a woman. He orders her now to go to 
Olivia, but Viola, at the point of intensity to which she 
has been brought by the music, by the hour, by the 
intimacy of the conversation, cannot bear to be sent to 
Olivia; delays her going, describes herself and her love 
in veiled images, hoping perhaps that he might see the 
truth. This is the well-known passage — 

A blank, my lord. She never told her love. 

But the Duke is blind ; Viola can bear his blindness no 
more ; better than this, it is to go to Olivia ! 



48 LECTURES ON SHAKESPEARE 

Sir, shall I to this lady ? 

the very thing she has been trying to avoid. Quite 
inimitable is all this to-and-fro of dramatic feeling. 

And to Olivia she goes ; and again, in a gay reaction, 
plays with the situation. Olivia declares her love, and 
Viola, whom the touch of love always thrills into her own 
passion, thinks of the Duke, and cries out the intensity, 
the singleness of her affection — 

By innocence I swear, and by my youth, 
I have one heart, one bosom and one truth, 
And that no woman has ; nor never none 
Shall mistress be of it, save I alone. 

She leaves Olivia, and is egged on to a duel with Ague- 
cheek by that practical joker, Sir Toby. Few scenes are 
more charming on the stage than Viola's pretty cowardice 
in which her womanhood revolts from the sword she 
wears; than her final resolution to carry through the 
duel ; her rescue by Antonio, who mistakes her for Sebas- 
tian ; and her solitary joy in the thought that her brother, 
after all, may be alive. For the moment she forgets the 
Duke, and the tenderness of her natural piety as a sister 
is on her lips, and in her sweet imagination. 

Prove true, imagination, prove true, 
That I, dear brother, be now ta'en for you ! 

0, if it prove, 
Tempests are kind and salt waves fresh in love. 

Olivia, to whom I turn, is another instance of that 
freakishness of the God of Love, with which Shakespeare 
so often pleased himself, He has drawn one kind of love 
in the Duke, another kind in Viola. He draws still 
another kind in Olivia — the quick-flaming love which is 
more of the senses than the soul, born in a moment of 
impulse, unable to restrain itself, confessing its weakness, 
increasing its heat the more it is repulsed, proud of its 
passion, and hastening, like a torrent, to its satisfaction. 



TWELFTH NIGHT 49 

Yet, in the circumstances, there is some excuse. She has 
been wooed incessantly ; everything has been laid at her 
feet by the Duke, and incessancy, flattery, and subservience 
have bored this fine lady. For the first time in her life, she 
meets in Cesario with a man, as she thinks, whose whole 
talk is a delicate mockery of her ; who, it is plain, does not 
care a pin for her beauty and her wealth ; who woos her 
for another, and who is clearly glad to get away from her. 
And this, being strange and new, takes her fancy, and 
when she sees that Cesario is a most beautiful young 
man, with, moreover, the gift of eloquence, and witty 
withal, her fancy slips in an instant, and with all the 
sudden impulsiveness of a wilful and idle woman, into 
love; which, being checked and repelled, runs at once 
into passion. She is herself astonished by this — 

Not too fast : soft, soft ! 
Unless the master were the man. How now ! 
• Even so quickly may one catch the plague ? 
Methinks I feel this youth's perfections 
With an invisible and subtle stealth 
To creep in at mine eyes. Well, let it be. 

And with that little phrase, instinct with the recklessness 
of a woman who has always followed, and is able to 
follow, her own will, she accepts the situation — and her 
resolve to see no man, and to mourn her brother in a 
seven years' solitude, is as if it had never been. And 
yet she has some sense of the strangeness of her conduct, 
and she declares it is the fault of Fate, not of her will — 

Fate, show thy force : ourselves we do not owe ; 
What is decreed must be, and be this so ! 

An interesting woman — interesting as an example of 
some of her own class who have nothing to do and 
plenty of wealth and will to do it with; but not inter- 
esting in any other fashion. At the last, she is frankness 
itself. She flings her confession of love into Cesario 's 

D 



50 LECTURES ON SHAKESPEARE 

face. Nor wit nor reason can her passion hide. Then, by 
an immense good fortune, she finds Sebastian, the very 
image and mirror of Cesar io, and her most jealous and 
too doubtful soul can now live in peace. With the same 
sudden speed with which she loved at first, she hurries on 
her marriage. Olivia would be a little vulgar were she not 
so reckless. She is rough, even ill-mannered, to the Duke. 
But then, the Duke would go on wooing her till she was 
bored. And a woman's boredom includes death to the 
man who bores her, complicated with protracted torture 
to avenge what she has suffered. Some praise her for the 
conduct of her house, but it seems to me she let it drift ; 
and I trust Sebastian got Sir Toby Belch into some decent 
order. Yet, I need not wish that, for he married Maria ; 
and I am sure that clever girl reorganised, with enough 
sympathy, the old toper. Sebastian, of course, thinks 
that Olivia manages her house perfectly. It would be 
odd if he did not. But, afterwards, when he broke Sir 
Toby's head, and drove Sir Andrew back to his country 
house, it looks as if he had changed his mind. Olivia 
does not really trouble about these disorders. She is too 
great a lady. She tells Maria to tell the drunkards not to 
make so much noise. She hands matters over to Malvolio 
to look after. When Malvolio comes in smiling and 
cross-gartered, thinking she is in love with him, she is 
scarcely aware of his existence ; and when he presses it 
upon her, she is only sorry that he has lost his senses. 
In the last scene she is just to him, but he is not of her 
class ; and she dismisses even the thought of his being 
abused with one word, half pity, half scorn — 

Alas, poor fool, how have they baffled thee ! 

Olivia is Shakespeare's study of a ' great lady in her youth,' 
whose will is her only law. Sebastian, with his courage, 
his high sense of honour, his loving gratitude to Antonio, 



TWELFTH NIGHT 51 

his noble blood on which the Duke dwells, his youthful 
delight in his good luck, and his joy in Olivia's love, will 
get on very well with her if he follows her moods. But 
he is scarcely in the play. 

Below all this high level of fine society is the underplot 
carried on by the retainers of Olivia's household and a 
friend from the country. It might be called, I said, The 
Mocking of Malvolio. The characters are Sir Toby Belch, 
Sir Andrew Aguecheek, names invented to suggest the 
men ; Fabian, the Clown or rather the paid Jester, Maria, 
Olivia's waiting-maid, and Malvolio. Malvolio is the 
steward and the rest are hangers-on to the rich house. 
Malvolio excepted (he is their enemy and their foil), they 
are as reckless, wild, and ill-behaved as folk who, having 
nothing to do, to earn, or to pay, are likely to be. I dare 
say there were hundreds of such folk about the houses of 
the Elizabethan nobles. 

Olivia did not rule them ; and Sir Toby, being her uncle, 
presumed on her indifference. But it was not likely that 
any of the retainers of the great houses of the time were in 
the midst of their quaffing and eating, singing and roaring, 
half so witty, amusing, dramatic, as these pleasant folk 
are in the hands of the magician who created them. 
They carouse night and day, and have no respect, since 
Sir Toby leads them, of place, persons, or time. Yet they 
sing no lewd ditties, but one of the most graceful songs 
in the world. And in spite of their material grossness^ 
there is no such vile grossness in their talk as Shake- 
speare's contemporary dramatists would surely have in- 
serted. Their conversation is as clean as the moon. 1 
Moreover it is most excellent fooling, inimitably fitted for 
the stage. Their wit almost excuses their excesses ; every 

1 It is remarkable that when the darkness fell on Shakespeare, his 
lower characters sometimes use a grossness in thought and speech, which 
was not so before. 



52 LECTURES ON SHAKESPEARE 

one bubbles up with humour. Even Sir Andrew, who is 
silly, is humorously silly, and is the fruitful cause of humour 
in others. He is such a fool that Sir Toby thinks he 
reaches the ideal, the archetype of silliness. Sir Toby has 
been compared with Falstaff, but, as I have said, foolishly. 
He is a drunkard, and has a drunkard's ideality at times ; 
but, sober, he is a nonentity compared with Falstaff, who is, 
with all his love of sack, never drunk ; and is wittiest and 
wisest not only when he is playing with men and circum- 
stances, but when he is quite alone and musing upon the 
world. Sir Toby is the jovial toper, with a turn for fun, 
and an ear, like every one else in the play, for good music. 
It is his creed that, where there is no jollity, there is no 
life; and he makes everything that is against his jollity 
into an excuse for it. 

What a plague means my niece, to take the death of her brother thus ? 
I am sure care 's an enemy to life. 

1 Every night,' scolds Maria, ' Sir Andrew is drunk in your 
company ' — 

"With drinking healths to my niece : I '11 drink to her as long as there 
is a passage in my throat and drink in Illyria. 

There is the man. He deserves a good study, and so 
does Sir Andrew Aguecheek, but there is no time for 
this. They are admirably set together ; and it is worth 
while to compare the natural silliness of Sir Andrew with 
the self-endued silliness of the Clown. The one thinks 
himself wise and witty and is neither ; the other pretends 
to be a fool, but has the low and cunning wisdom of his 
calling. 

Maria is the wittiest of them all. She keeps with 
prudence her place with Olivia; lures Sir Toby into 
marrying her ; manages these drunkards into some quiet ; 
invents the practical joke they all play on Malvolio, and, 
to her credit, enjoys the result more than any of them. 



TWELFTH NIGHT 53 

She is the queen of this lower world. 'Good-night, 
Penthesilea,' cries Sir Toby. ' Wilt thou set thy foot o' 
my neck/ he says again, enchanted with her cleverness. 
He marries her for her wit. Follow me, she cries. 
To the gates of Tartar, answers Sir Toby, thou most 
excellent devil of wit. This ideality in marriage recon- 
ciles me altogether to Sir Toby. And Maria deserved to 
become Olivia's aunt by marriage — a very amusing situa- 
tion — and no doubt to be pensioned off; for her deceiving 
letter, which makes of Malvolio a gull, is a very miracle 
of cleverness. Almost as clever is her description of 
Malvolio, where her hearty dislike of the man pierces to 
the falsehood in him. Hate has good eyes for bad things. 

The devil a Puritan that he is, or anything constantly, but a time- 
pleaser ; an affectioned ass, that cons state without book and utters it 
by great swaths : the best persuaded of himself, so crammed, as he 
thinks, with excellencies, that it is his grounds of faith that all that 
look on him love him ; and on that vice in him will my revenge find 
notable cause to work. 

Olivia also sees through the pretension of this man, and 
more clearly than Maria. She has no hate of him to 
obscure any part of her judgment; and she sketches him 
to himself in one of the few wise things she says. Mal- 
volio has been girding at the fool's folly, as if it were a 
most shocking thing — 

0, you are sick of self-love, Malvolio, and taste with a distempered 
appetite. To be generous, guiltless, and of free disposition, is to take 
those things for bird-bolts that you deem cannon-bullets. 

Live and let live, she thinks ; even the fool has his place in 
the world, just as Lafeu thinks of Parolles. And folly 
which has no self-love is better than worldly wisdom 
which has it. It is better that the world of men should 
be 'mostly fools' than mostly Carlyles. This world 
of ours which self-love makes so troublesome is none 
the worse for all the folly which does not think of 
itself. 



54 LECTURES ON SHAKESPEARE 

Malvolio is not a pleasant person. I dare say Shakespeare 
— though this would be unlike his custom — did represent 
in him a certain disagreeable element in Elizabethan 
Puritanism. The Puritans seem to have been on his mind. 
He mentions the Brownists in this play. But I do not 
think he meant to satirise Puritanism itself in Malvolio, 
or the honest Puritans, of whom he must have known and 
honoured many. What he made a fool of in Malvolio was 
the Puritanism which opposed all mirth and jollity as sin. 
* Dost thou think,' cries Sir Toby to him (and the phrase 
hits a universal folly in this extreme type), 'dost thou 
think, because thou art virtuous, there shall be no more 
cakes and ale ? ' What he satirised was the Puritan who 
used his grim morality as a ladder to self-advancement. 
His wide humanity would dislike the first, his deep sense of 
honour would despise the second. But Malvolio is worse 
than any rigid Puritan. His will is evil because he is up 
to the throat in self-love. Every one who is noticed by the 
Countess stands in his way. He hates them all for this, 
and they hate him. And when self-love begets self-admira- 
tion, its vanity grows with speed to a monstrous size. 
When we are half through the play Malvolio believes 
(before Maria's letter) that Olivia is in love with him, and 
that he is lord of her household. Of course, he tumbles 
into the snare laid for him, and becomes a greater and a 
greater fool, till (like Olivia, who, seizing her own way, says 
that Fate has done it) he declares that Jove himself has 
taken his matters in hand. ' Well,' he says, ' Jove, not I, 
is the doer of this, and he is to be thanked.' 

Nothing better could have happened to him than his 
imprisonment as a madman. It gave him the chance of 
finding out that self-love was much more wicked than all 
the drunkenness of Sir Toby, or the reckless life of the 
household. And, indeed, it seems to have done him 
some good, or Shakespeare wished to touch the noble as 



TWELFTH NIGHT 55 

well as the ignoble fibre of Puritanism. For, when he is 
asked what he thinks of the opinion of Pythagoras — ' That 
the soul of our grandam might haply inhabit a bird/ he 
answers — and the answer contains the strength of Puritan- 
ism — ' I think nobly of the soul, and in no way approve his 
opinion.' But the vanities of self-love return when he 
is loosed, and are all alive again. He still believes that 
Olivia has loved him, then that she has done him wrong — 
Olivia ! who scarcely recognised his existence !■ — so hard it 
is to break down the building self-love has architectured. 
At last, when he finds out that he has been notoriously 
abused by the sportful malice of a waiting-maid, a drunk- 
ard, a silly knight and a fool ; when all the building of 
conceit falls into laughable ruin, the central vice of the 
man breaks into fury, and he flings them all his savage 

farewell — 

I '11 be revenged on the whole pack of you. 

And now I finish this lecture with things that taste 
sweeter in the mouth. In the fifth Act the personages 
are brought together, and all that they say not only 
harmonises with, but enhances, their several characters, 
Olivia is still Olivia; Viola is Viola with her passion 
deepened. The Duke, while retaining his sentiment, is 
developed into a man and a master of affairs. Sebastian 
is himself, and has broken Sir Toby's head, and made 
havoc of Sir Andrew ; and Sir Toby, knocked out of his 
humour by pain, and made truthful by drink, settles 
the character of Sir Andrew who offers to help him to a 
surgeon — 

Will you help 1 An ass-head and a coxcomb and a knave, a thin-faced 
knave, and a gull ! 

When Olivia, thinking Viola to be her husband Sebastian, 
claims him before the Duke, Viola, in this crisis, throws 
all concealment of her love aside. She turns to the 



56 LECTURES ON SHAKESPEARE 

Duke, who has threatened her with death to spite Olivia, 
and cries — 

And I, most jocund, apt and willingly, 

To do you rest, a thousand deaths would die. 

Oli. Where goes Cesario 1 

Vio. After him I love 

More than I love these eyes, more than my life, 
More, by all mores, than e'er I shall love wife. 

No hesitation ; full, frank assertion of undying love. Given 
the moment, nothing can be more natural to Viola's 
character. She who once said she never told her love, 
now, angry with Olivia's claim, and wrought to the height 
of passionate feeling, breaks into open and intense ex- 
pression of her love ; and is most true to her character 
when she seems to contradict its past. She is following 
the Duke, when Olivia calls her ' husband ' ! Then the high 
honour of a gentleman shines in the Duke. He checks 
his departure, and demands the proof. It is apparently 
given, and though he turns in wrath on Yiola — 

thou dissembling cub ! What wilt thou be 
When time hath sow'd a grizzle on thy case ? 

he says no more ; he threatens no more. He remembers 
that he is a gentleman — 

Farewell, and take her ; but direct thy feet 
Where thou and I henceforth may never meet. 

To relieve this intense moment, Sir Andrew enters with 
his head broken, and declares that Viola has done it. 
Then, and most dramatically, Sebastian enters, and all 
the knot is disentangled. The discovery of Viola by 
Sebastian, of Sebastian by Viola, while the rest look on in 
wonder, is most delicate and lovely — 

See. Do I stand there ? I never had a brother ; 
Nor can there be that deity in my nature, 
Of here and everywhere. I had a sister, 
Whom the blind waves and surges have devour'd. 
[To Viola]. Of charity, what kin are you to me ? 

What countryman ? What name ? What parentage 1 



TWELFTH NIGHT 57 

Vio. Of Messaline : Sebastian was my father ; 
Such a Sebastian was my brother too, 
So went he suited to his watery tomb : 
If spirits can assume both form and suit, 
You come to fright us. 

Seb. A spirit I am, indeed 

But am in that dimension grossly clad 
Which from the womb I did participate 
Were you a woman, as the rest goes even, 
I should my tears let fall upon your cheek, 
And say — Thrice welcome, drowned Viola ! 

With that, all the trouble is past. Viola, reverting to the 
practical side of her character, explains the matter with 
brief clearness ; and then, turning to the Duke, her eyes 
alit with love, passes into her world of imaginative 
passion — 

Duke. Boy, thou hast said to me a thousand times 

Thou never shouldst love woman like to me. 
Vio. And all those sayings will I over-swear ; 

And all those swearings keep as true in soul 

As doth that orbed continent the fire 

That severs day from night. 

Now all the pretty play is over. It has been part of the 
great world. Wherever it is played or read, it is part 
again of the great world of man. And perhaps the last 
verse of the song, with which the Clown closes it, means 
to tell that truth. If it does not, 'tis no matter — 

A great while ago the world begun, 

With hey, ho, the wind and the rain, 
But that 's all one, our play is done, 

And we '11 strive to please you every day. 



Ill 

JULIUS C.ESAR 

The play of Julius Ccesar is the form into which 
Shakespeare cast the materials he had collected out of 
Plutarch's Lives of Caesar, Antony, and Brutus. The sub- 
ject was a common one. Polonius says in Hamlet : In the 
university ' I did enact Julius Caesar : I was killed in the 
Capitol : Brutus killed me.' Every one knows how much 
life Plutarch gave to his characters, but the life which 
Shakespeare gave them was more full, various, and feel- 
ing than Plutarch's power could paint. A multitude of 
stories interesting as history, a host of philosophic remarks 
interesting as Plutarch's, illuminate but sometimes over- 
whelm the presentation of these three men by Plutarch. 
In Shakespeare's play, the men themselves are the first 
interest ; and only those events and passions are chosen 
out of the history, which develop the characters, urge on 
the action of the play, or enliven the scenes into a vivid 
reality. The political philosophy, of which there is a fair 
sprinkling in the play, does not seem to proceed from 
Shakespeare, but from the very nature of each of the 
characters he has separately individualised. Even when 
Brutus, Cassius, Casca lay down identical theories, the 
expression of them is different on the lips and in the mind 
of each. In all that Plutarch writes of his men we are 
in touch with Plutarch, but in this play we do not touch 
Shakespeare, but Brutus, Cassius, Antony, Casca, Cicero, 
or Caesar. And in this contrast is contained the eternal 
distinction between the man of talent and the man of 

68 



JULIUS CLESAR 59 

genius, between the describer and the creator, between 
the intellectual man and the poet. 

Then, again, a creative genius, having collected his 
materials, feels his mastery over them, and uses them 
as he pleases. He is going to make a greater matter 
than that which actually happened; something that 
will endure when the historical events have become 
dreams. Therefore Shakespeare makes what changes he 
will in the history of Plutarch. He makes Caesar's 
triumph occur on the same date as the Lupercalia. It 
really took place six months previously. He brings the 
murder of Caesar, the funeral speeches, and the arrival of 
Octavius in Rome, into the circle of one day instead of 
many. He combines into one the two battles of Philippi, 
quietly setting aside the interval of twenty days between 
them. This is the imagination dealing as it pleases with 
facts. It is possible historians may dislike it, but what 
talk we of historians when there is such a man as 
Shakespeare. 

Nor does he less show his sense of mastery over his 
materials when he takes from Plutarch, whenever he 
thinks them good enough for his purposes, the very words 
that Plutarch uses or invents. It is true they were in 
the noble English of North's translation — contemporary 
English with which Shakespeare was in sympathy — but 
all the more one would think that he would avoid tran- 
scribing whole sentences, almost word for word, out of 
North's prose into blank verse. Not at all. Genius takes 
all it wants, and is confident of its right to do this. * I 
have power to adopt what is good,' Genius would say if 
he were questioned, ' because it is better where I place it 
than it was in its original surroundings.' 

The play appeared in 1601. Weever's Mirror of 
Martyrs, printed in 1601, refers to Antony's speech in this 
play, for which there is no original in Plutarch. Hence 



60 LECTURES ON SHAKESPEARE 

we know that Julius Gcesar preceded Weever's book, and 
probably was written in 1600. It was acted at the 
beginning of 1601. 

The subject-matter of the play was of great interest at 
this time. Perhaps in 1562, certainly before 1579, and 
again in 1588, there were plays on the fate of Caesar. In 
1589 a play with the title Julius Ccesar was known, and 
was acted by Shakespeare's company in 1594. Then, 
after Shakespeare's play, that is, after 1601, a number of 
plays represented various portions and views of the same 
subject. Indeed, the matter has always engaged the 
thoughts of men, their passion and their genius. It 
is a political interest ; — the natural war which has existed 
since the beginning of the world between the idea of 
Liberty and the force of Autocracy ; and this play, where 
the two powers clash, where they are impersonated in 
Caesar and Brutus, has been, on many a stage, the means 
of giving expression to the anger and pity of those who, 
among a people degraded by the gratuities and coaxing 
of Imperialism, lived and died for the rugged liberties 
they could not win. 

That interest has been seen and felt in this play. 
What has not been seen and felt in it — at least not to my 
knowledge — is that it puts, indirectly, into artistic form 
the two reasons why revolutions which are in the right 
do not always succeed against forms of government 
which are in the wrong : that is, why a struggle for freedom 
fails against a tyranny, or, if it should succeed for a time, 
as in the French Revolution, why it finally falls again 
under the power of a despotism. 

The first of these reasons is — that the single idea 
which belongs to all the revolutionists is not kept apart, 
in each of them, from personal motives. Each man adds 
to it his own interest or his own passion; and these 
several interests or passions divide the men from one 



JULIUS CAESAR 61 

another. Then unity is lost, and with the loss of unity, 
force is dispersed. Of all the conspirators, only Brutus 
had a single aim uninjured by any personal motive. 
Shakespeare makes that plain. His Cassius, Casca, 
Cinna, and the rest, had each his own axe to grind, or his 
own personal envy of Caesar. Not one of them is ever 
able to conceive the impersonal, the unselfish attitude of 
Brutus. Brutus — and this is the deep tragedy of the play 
— far apart from the rest in his own ideal world, thinks, 
stands, lives, and dies alone. His is a position which has 
been repeated again and again in the history of revolu- 
tions. It was, to give one example from our own time, 
the position of Delecluze in the story of the Commune. 
The other conspirators have little bond of union except 
the desire to slay Caesar ; no uniting ideal aim in which 
their individual selfishnesses are absorbed. Where that 
is the case, as often it has been in the story of the struggle 
of Ireland, and, as yet, of the working classes in England 
and abroad, failure is certain. 1 Even if, for the moment, 
they act together, as in the slaughter of Caesar, they fall 
asunder, each to his own interest, when the act is accom- 
plished ; and their want of union for one collective, ideal 
aim ruins their cause. The only thing which binds the 
conspirators together after the death of Caesar is that 
they are all proscribed, and have to fight for their lives. 
It is astonishing how clearly this comes out in Julius 
Ccesar. It dominates the play till the death of Caesar. 
It is not neglected afterwards. Even the great and vital 
friendship between Brutus and Cassius is imperilled by 
the personal aims of Cassius. On the eve of the battle 
which will decide their fate, these two friends all but 
split usunder. 

1 There have been many men like Brutus whose aims were pure of self 
in the struggle of Ireland and in that of the working class, but there have 
been only too many who played the part of Cassius, Casca, and the rest. 



62 LECTURES ON SHAKESPEARE 

Again, a still more important reason why revolutions 
against Imperialism fail, is that their leaders have no 
settled form of government ready to replace that which 
they have overthrown; and no men, trained in official 
work, to use as means for carrying on a government. 
The consequence is, that after the outburst everything is 
at sixes and sevens ; the various parties devour one 
another; and in the confusion the mere mob of the 
violent, unthinking, drifting people get the upper hand. 
Anarchy, then, makes every kind of human life and 
effort, and all property, uncertain ; and then the steady 
body of the whole State, sick of disturbance, illegality, 
change, uncertainty, welcomes despotism again, because it 
governs. This was the career of the French Revolution. 

Shakespeare makes the lesson clear in this play. The 
pure political idealist, like Brutus, is absolutely at sea 
the moment he has destroyed the government of Caesar. 
And Cassius, Casca, Cinna, like Brutus, have nothing 
ready with which to replace it. They are all left, in 
ridiculous failure and confusion, face to face with the 
mob whom the embryo imperialism of Caesar has 
weakened and degraded by amusements and gratuities. 
Nothing can be better put than this is by Shakespeare in 
the blind, futile, inconsequent, disintegrated talk of the 
conspirators after they have slain Caesar. Brutus, their 
noblest comrade, is at this crisis the most amazingly 
foolish of them all. He loses his head. He shouts like 
an Anarchist. He thinks all Rome is on his side. He 
is absolutely ignorant of the people he has only conceived 
in his study. He thinks Rome will govern itself. He 
takes no measures to set any government on foot. He 
believes in Antony ! He acts like a man in a dream. He 
makes a speech to the people, hands them over to Antony's 
seductive tongue, and walks home, as if he had done 
nothing and had nothing more to do, to talk the matter 



JULIUS CAESAR 63 

over with Portia. The inevitable follows ; and he flies for 
his life with Cassius through the gates of the city he has, 
by his action, handed over to a more organised despotism 
than Caesar ever exercised. 

Imperialism has won, Republicanism has failed, and 
Shakespeare, in the quiet apartness of the Creator, marks 
out, through the dramatic action and speech of his 
characters, what are the main points of the event. He 
records things as they are, and in the quarrel seems to 
take no side. This is the proper position of a great 
dramatist. Yet, as in Coriolanus, where Shakespeare's 
sympathy seems, on the whole, to be on the side of the 
tribunes, so here, and more probably here than in any 
other play, the personal sympathy of Shakespeare seems 
to emerge on the side of Republicanism. He has, as 
always, his ' good-humoured contempt of the mob/ But 
there is a heightening of his phrasing, an intensity of the 
soul he puts into his words when he speaks of Brutus or 
makes him speak, which draws me into the imagination 
that his sympathy was with the thoughts of Brutus, the 
republican. There is not enough on which to base any 
definite conclusion, but there is enough on which to 
base a suggestion. And this suggestion of his personal 
sympathy with the Republicanism of Brutus is perhaps 
buttressed by the strange and half-contemptuous sketch 
he makes of Caesar, the great imperialist. It is unlike 
any other image I know of Caesar. He is represented as 
subject to superstitions, as wavering to and fro, as led by 
the nose by his enemies, as vain even to insolence, as 
having lost his intellectual powers in self-sufficiency, as 
one who thinks himself separated altogether from his 
fellow-men. His speeches are almost the speeches of 
a fool. Shakespeare seems to have gone out of his way 
to make this representation, this denigrante representa- 
tion ; and it is very curious when we contrast it with the 



64 LECTURES ON SHAKESPEARE 

lofty, dignified, and beautiful representation he makes of 
the man who embodies Republicanism. I do not say that 
Shakespeare was a republican ; that would be absurd. 
Nobody knows what he was; and he was not likely to 
openly sympathise with Republicanism, even of the kind 
then conceived, under the rule of Elizabeth. But he was 
likely to be opposed to despotism, to maintain the freedom 
which England had already won. And it is worth saying 
that when this play was written in 1601, Elizabeth had 
tried to enforce the Tudor despotism, to impose her 
own will on Parliament; and was successfully met and 
defeated by Parliament quietly insisting on its ancient 
liberties. She yielded with a good grace; but no 
Londoner, and least of all one of Shakespeare's vast 
intelligence, could be unaware of this struggle. A great 
contention of this kind steals into the thoughts and 
imagination of men, and consciously or unconsciously 
influences their work, even though the work have nothing 
to do with the struggle itself. I think it possible, then, 
that the representation of the contrasted political ideas 
of Brutus and Caesar, which Shakespeare (to the advan- 
tage of Brutus) makes so plain, was indirectly coloured 
by the struggle between Elizabeth and the Parliament — 
between the despotic will of the Queen and the ancient 
liberties of England. 

But all this is scarcely an argument, much less an asser- 
tion. The common thing to say is that Shakespeare, on 
debatable matters, such as politics and religion, took no 
side himself. And one proof of this impersonal attitude 
is, that even if he s} r mpathised with the political ideas of 
Brutus, he as plainly did not sympathise with his weak- 
ness in action, with his inability to govern or to manage 
men. His representation of Brutus both before and after 
the death of Caesar, is of a man totally unfit to handle 
events or to direct a State. Shakespeare may have thought 



JULIUS (LESAR 65 

it right to oppose despotism, but even despotism was 
better than anarchy. Brutus was a better man than 
Caesar or Octavius. But Brutus could not govern, Octavius 
could. 

The play is a political play, and of a kind different from 
that of any other in his works, even from that of Corio- 
lanus. It is concerned with affairs of State throughout, 
and when the ordinary passions of human life enter into 
it, they come as episodes. The domestic and personal life 
of Coriolanus is more important for that play than the 
affairs of the State. But in Julius Ccesar, on the con- 
trary, the relation between Portia and Brutus, the friend- 
ship between Brutus and Cassius, are extraneous ; do not 
affect the dramatic conduct of the drama, or the cata- 
strophe. They are relieving interludes of great charm, and 
made more charming still not only by the invention of 
Lucius, who in his happy youth has nothing to do with 
the storm of events around him, but also by the gentle 
and gracious relations between the boy and his master 
Brutus. But none of these things interfere with the main 
action — with the contest between Csesarism and the old 
Republicanism of Rome, between a worn-out Past and a 
living Present. Brutus is defeated ; Caesar conquers ; and 
the play is rightly named Julius Ccesar. 

Some have said it ought to be named by Brutus's name, 
and that he is the true hero of the drama. But great as 
Brutus is in the drama, and apparent master of its action, 
Caesar is in reality the cause of all the action and its 
centre. His spirit dominates the whole. But in the first 
part it is not the Caesar of the play who dominates, it is 
the Caesar who has been ; the life, the doings, the spirit of 
the Man who in the past has bestrid 'the world like a 
Colossus.' What Shakespeare has made of the existing 
Caesar is what a man becomes who having been great, 
thinks his will divine, even the master of Fate ; and fall- 

E 



66 LECTURES ON SHAKESPEARE 

ing into that temper which the Greeks called Insolence, 
becomes the fool of Vanity and the scorn of the gods who 
leave him to relentless Destiny. Shakespeare's picture 
of Caesar resembles the picture drawn by the Greek 
tragedians of the chiefs who, isolating themselves from 
their fellow-men, equalised themselves to the gods in 
their self-opinion, and placed themselves — as the gods did 
not — above eternal Law. But his present folly does not 
lessen Caesar's past greatness ; and Shakespeare takes 
pains to show how great he was, and how great he still is 
in the minds of men. The play opens with his triumph 
over Pompey. Brutus loves him, while he hates his idea 
of Empire. Cassius, Casca, while they cry him down, 
exalt his image in our eyes. When they slay him, they 
are like men who have murdered a world. Even the 
starry powers, in Shakespeare's imagination, emphasise 
his greatness. The whole heaven, when Caesar comes to 
die, is racked with storm ; lions roam the streets, the 
dead rise from their graves. And when he is dead, all 
his vanity and folly are forgotten instantly. Rome rises 
to drive out his assassins. His spirit broods over the rest 
of the play in executive power. It is Caesar who wins 
the battle of Philippi, who plants the sword in the heart 
of Cassius and of Brutus. The theory of government, 
because of which he died, defeats the theory Brutus held ; 
the new world he initiated disperses to all the winds the 
old world that Brutus, in vain, tried to reanimate. Caesar 
is lord of the play ; Brutus is in the second place. 

Being thus a Drama concerned with Statesmen and 
State affairs, there is but little in it of human passion at 
its height. The note of the play is low in sound. There 
is the passion for liberty in Brutus, but it is the passion 
of the student, not of the man of action. The same high 
passion is supposed to be in the other conspirators, but it 
is really the mean passion of envy which influences them. 



JULIUS (LESAR 67 

There is neither loftiness of motive nor depth of wrath for 
freedom in anything they say or do. 

Then, with regard to Brutus, his Stoic nature forbids in 
him deep emotion ; and his personal love for Caesar pre- 
vents him from feeling any intensity of indignation 
against Caesar. His love for Caesar depresses into a still 
sadness his eagerness for liberty. Moreover, he is not 
angry with anything Caesar has as yet done. He slays 
Caesar lest he should do wrong to liberty in the future. 
This doubt as to whether Caesar will become a tyrant 
or not (the slaughter of Caesar being only to prevent a 
possibility) would naturally take all passion out of his 
thought and act. Scepticism — save vaguely with regard 
to itself — is naturally unimpassioned, except in a young 
man like Hamlet. Brutus was a mature man and a Stoic. 
Sad and earnest then, in quiet Stoicism, without any 
passion, his mind works, and his hand strikes. His sense 
of what he thinks himself compelled to do depresses 
rather than excites him. Therefore, with regard to the 
passion for liberty, the dramatic note is low and still. 

Then, again, the human relations of this play do not 
reach the high levels of the great emotions. They are 
chiefly the relations of friend to friend. Antony is 
Caesar's friend, but his friendship is mixed with his 
political selfishness. His various speeches over Caesar's 
body rise now and then into a semblance of passion, 
but they are calculated. He sees himself rising into 
power on Caesar's death. He is as cool as an iceberg 
when he talks with Octavius and Lepidus. 

Again, the friendship of Brutus and Cassius is a true 
friendship but not an equal one. An unequal friendship 
does not stir into movement the deeper waters of feeling. 
The stronger nature of Brutus has another world in which 
to live where Cassius cannot come. One feels this apart- 
ness again and again in the famous dialogue between 



68 LECTURES ON SHAKESPEARE 

them. Even in the reconciliation there is that conde- 
scension on the part of Brutus which is incompatible 
with an impassioned friendship. 

Only in the relation between Portia and Brutus is there 
any deep emotion in the play, and the scenes between 
him and her scarcely belong to the movement of the 
drama. Shakespeare knew how noble, when it was good, 
was the type of the Roman woman as mother, wife, and 
friend ; and Portia claims from Brutus all that a man 
owes to one who has become bone of his bone, flesh of 
his flesh. She must also be spirit of his spirit, thought 
of his thought. ' Tell me all,' she cries, 

by that great vow 
Which did incorporate and make us one, 

Am I yourself 
But, as it were, in sort or limitation, 
To keep with you at meals, comfort your bed, 
And talk to you sometimes ? Dwell I but in the suburbs 
Of your good pleasure ? If it be no more, 
Portia is Brutus' harlot, not his wife. 

Then, to that impassioned voice, answers that cry of high 
emotion, so rare on the lips of the Stoic : 

You are my true and honourable wife, 
As dear to me as are the ruddy drops 
That visit my sad heart. 

As to Portia, she is compact of love. When he is with 
her, she sees everything he does. All his restlessness 
is open to her, and reflected by her. Till his heart is 
fully disclosed to her, she has no peace. When he goes 
away from her to slay Caesar, her soul goes with him. 
She sends the boy to the Senate-house, but forgets to tell 
him what to do in her excitement. She can scarcely 
keep her passion silent, calls on a mountain to press down 
her tongue ; sees, as if she were present, what is being 
done in the Capitol ; hears the noise of the fray ; half 



JULIUS CAESAR 69 

betrays to the Soothsayer her knowledge of the 
conspiracy — 

Why, knowest thou any harm 's intended towards him ? 

At last, she can bear the weight of her passion no more. 

I must go in. Ay me, how weak a thing 
The heart of woman is ! Brutus, 
The heavens speed thee in thine enterprise ! 
Sure, the boy heard me. Brutus hath a suit 
That Caesar will not grant. 0, I grow faint. 

That is of feeling quite intense ; and the last news of her 
confirms its intensity. The woman in her cannot bear 
the strain of the danger Brutus is in from Octavius. 
She falls into distraction and swallows fire. This is the 
one presentation of deep passion in the play, and it is 
isolated from the rest of the action. 

Though the image of Csesar dominates the play, and 
Csesarism conquers in it, yet its main subject is the work- 
ing out of the fate of Brutus as the last hero of Eoman 
liberty ; and the fall of Republicanism in his death is the 
true catastrophe of the Drama. The representation of 
this might have been made more impassioned. But, even 
in this, passion was excluded, because Brutus, being a 
Stoic, his law of life excluded passion. Shakespeare was 
forced then to keep his representation of Brutus quiet. 
And nowhere is his careful work as an artist more remark- 
able, more close to his conception of a Stoic student 
pushed into the storm of great affairs, than in his slow, 
restrained, temperate development of the character of 
Brutus. Again and again we expect a high outburst of 
poetry. The events seem to call for it from Brutus. But 
Shakespeare does not choose him to rise above the level 
of his Stoicism ; he does not even permit the tide of his 
own emotion, as he writes, to erase the stern lines of the 
character he has conceived. Twice only (after Caesar's 



70 LECTURES ON SHAKESPEARE 

slaughter, and during the battle), Brutus is swept out of 
his self-restraint. 

Nevertheless the position of Brutus, though it is 
marked by this self- quietude, is a noble subject for 
dramatic poetry. It is the struggle of the hero who 
belongs to a past world against the victorious pull of 
the present world. And since Brutus is high-hearted, 
and his idea morally right, and the world he fought with 
ignoble and unmoral, his overthrow does not lower him 
in our eyes. He is conquered by circumstance, but his 
soul is unconquered. He becomes more fit for lofty tragic 
poetry when, as the play moves on, he stands alone in his 
nobleness, apart not only from his enemies, but in the 
purity of his motives from his friends. And the tragic in 
him is lifted into splendour of subject when we see clearly 
that which he did not see till he came to die : that the 
death of Caesar — the means, that is, which he took in order 
to bring back to Rome the freedom that he loved — was 
the very event which riveted on Rome the Imperialism 
which he hated. Few situations are more poetic. The 
ghost of Old Rome stands on the threshold of Imperial 
Rome, and fades before its worldly splendour. But as the 
phantom fades away, we follow it with praise and honour. 
It will rise into life again when Imperial Rome shall have 
fallen into the helpless ruin it deserved. The spirit of 
Brutus can never die. 

In the very first scene (in Shakespeare's preparing 
fashion), two main elements of the drama are repre- 
sented. There is, first, the mindless mob, spoilt by the 
bread and games successive leaders have given to it; 
which has no care for liberty or any policy, only for 
entertainment. The second is the division of Rome into 
violent parties. We see the partisans of Pompey and 
Caesar, hot with anger ; then, in another class, all those 



JULIUS CESAR 71 

who, like the tribunes, hold some office, and are enraged 
with Caesar who threatens to take all offices into himself. 
These two elements become as it were two leit-motifs, 
which occur again and again throughout the play. We 
hear in the first Scene the growl of the popular storm 
which threatens Csesar. In the next we are in the thick 
of it. Csesar enters in triumph. A short dialogue, quick 
and crisp, sketches the pride, the superstition, the inso- 
lentia of Caesar — the temper of one whom the gods have 
doomed ; the flattery which has brought him to this point 
of foolishness ; the pride which could not conceive that 
misfortune or death could touch him. When the Sooth- 
sayer bids him beware, he cries- 
He is a dreamer ; let us leave him : pass. 

The pageant then passes on, and Cassius and Brutus are 
left alone. We hear that Brutus has been brooding of 
late, apart from his friends, in silence. No one knows, not 
even Cassius, what turn his thoughts have taken on the 
politics of Rome. Has he even discovered himself what 
he thinks ? There are thoughts in us which we need to 
hear shaped by another person or by some event before 
we are conscious that we have had them for a long time ; 
and Brutus is in this condition when Cassius probes him 
about Csesar — 

Bru. Into what dangers would you lead me, Cassius, 
That you wo aid have me seek into myself 
For that which is not in me ? 

Then the event finishes what Cassius had begun. A 

shout at a distance forces out of Brutus the dominant and 

concealed thoughts within him, and crystallises them 

into expression — 

What means this shouting ? I do fear, the people 
Choose Csesar for their King. 

On that Cassius works to win Brutus to his side against 
Csesar ; and at every point of the dialogue the character 



72 LECTURES ON SHAKESPEARE 

of Cassius is dramatically divided from the character of 
Brutus. Brutus only cares for the public weal, for his 
republican ideal. Cassius is consumed with envy of 
Caesar; and the bitter hatred of envy appears in the 
stories he tells of Caesar's physical weakness — anything to 
degrade the image of the man he hates — as if Caesar's not 
being able to swim well, or his trembling in a fever, proved 
that he was not a better man than Cassius or Brutus. 
This has no effect on Brutus, who is incapable of envy. 
Brutus scarcely hears him. He is listening for a re- 
newal of the shouts. Then Cassius, seeing that the chord 
of jealousy and envy does not answer to his touch, changes 
his attack, and changes its motive three times in the 
course of his speech until at last he strikes the note 
which is answered in the soul of Brutus. First, it is 
discontent with Fate that he touches — 'Why should we 
be underlings and he half a god?' That note does not 
touch Brutus. Then he tries ambition — ' Why, Brutus, 
should you not be as great as Caesar ? ' That also does 
not affect him either. At last he sounds the note of the 
ancient liberty of Rome — 

There was a Brutus once that would have brook'd 
The eternal devil to keep his state in Rome 
As easily as a king. 

That echoes in the soul of Brutus ; and to develop it 
further into act, Caesar enters in all his pomp. Shake- 
speare's pictorial imagination strikes out, as it were in 
flashes, the outward appearance and the characteristics of 

the passers-by — 

Look you, Cassius, 
The angry spot doth glow on Caesar's brow, 
And all the rest look like a chidden train : 
Calpurnia's cheek is pale, and Cicero 
Looks with such ferret and such fiery eyes 
As we have seen him in the Capitol, 
Being cross'd in conference by some senators. 

It might be made a picture of. Then Caesar (in the one 



JULIUS OZESAR 73 

speech he makes which is worthy of his intelligence), 
sketches Cassius so vividly that he is immortalised ; and 
then Antony with one slight touch — full of flying power — 

Yond Cassius has a lean and hungry look ; 
He thinks too much ; such men are dangerous. 

He is a great observer, and he looks 

Quite through the deeds of men ; he loves no plays, 

As thou dost, Antony ; he hears no music : 

Seldom he smiles, and smiles in such a sort 

As if he mock'd himself, and scorn'd his spirit 

That could be moved to smile at anything. 

Such men as he be never at heart's ease, 

Whiles they behold a greater than themselves, 

And therefore are they very dangerous. 

Here and here alone Caesar speaks up to the level of his 
former self. When he has passed by, Casca takes up the 
presentation, and we see, as if we were on the spot, 
the scene when the crown is offered to Caesar, and the 
mob, and the women, and Casca's own bitter envy. Then 
in a single phrase Cicero is painted ; the cultivated 
literary man who is isolated from the common herd in 
dainty pride of culture. 

Cas. Did Cicero say anything 1 
Casca. Ay, he spoke Greek. 

Every blunt word of Casca lays bare his embittered and 
jealous heart, and we can almost see the 'quick metal' 
in his face. Even more vividly is the heart of Brutus 
disclosed to us in this masterly dialogue. The desperate 
thought which has been born in him — that Caesar must be 
silenced — grows steadily while he listens to Cassius and 
questions Casca. He is thinking of what Caesar has done, 
and of that alone. He questions, questions, that he may 
be sure that Caesar is trying for the crown, that he may 
set his mind at rest. Though he says little, it is enough 
to enable us to follow his soul in doubt. Must I slay 
Caesar whom I love ? Is there no way out of it ? I must 



74 LECTURES ON SHAKESPEARE 

have time to think. To-morrow, Cassius, come to me, or I 
will come to you. His mind runs round the circumference 
of his thought, but never quite enters the circle ; hesitating, 
this way and that dividing his dread, his impulse, and 
his duty. And so, in this slow progress of his thought to 
its shaping, we leave him for a time. He leaves Cassius 
alone, who comments on his character: 'Noble, yet so 
simple that he may be wrought into my conspiracy.' 

The night falls then, and the third Scene opens amid a 
great tempest, full of terror and portents. The meaning 
of it in the play is put afterwards on Calpurnia's lips : 

The heavens themselves blaze forth the death of Princes. 

We have seen how often Shakespeare used the common 
belief that Nature mixed herself up with those great human 
events which, striking at chief men, struck at humanity. 
Nay, more, he made Nature reflect the passions of men 
when they reached intensity. He writes as if he believed 
that a spiritual power in Nature was in touch with the 
deep things in man and in his history. We remember 
the storm which accompanies the murder of Duncan ; the 
fury of the elements which reflects and heightens the 
agony of Lear. And here, to develop this thought of his, 
and at the same time to dramatise it, he represents at length 
what each of his characters thinks of the storm. And it 
affects them all in a different way. This suppression of 
his own idea, and this out-creation of it in other lives than 
his own, other thoughts than his own, is most masterly in 
this scene, and most effective on the stage. 

Casca, the envious scoffer, who respects nothing, is like 
many of his tribe, smitten by the storm into superstitious 
terror. With his sword drawn, breathless and staring, 
thinking the world is ending, he meets Cicero ; and the 
little sketch of Cicero is delightful. He is perfectly 
unmoved by the terror of the night ; as quiet as if all the 



JULIUS (LESAR 75 

stars were shining in a peaceful sky — only astonished by 
the state of mind in which Casca presents himself. Hear 
how placid are his sentences — 

Good even, Casca : brought you Csesar home ? 
Why are you breathless ? and why stare you so ? 

And to Casca's relation of the awful sights — a lion met 
near the Capitol, a man with a burning hand, men all on 
fire walking the streets, the owl shrieking at noonday, 
and the skies dropping fire — he replies in a philosophic 
strain as if he were in his study; and then asks about 
the news of the day, as if he were at his club — 

Indeed, it is a strange-disposed time : 
But men may construe things after their fashion, 
Clean from the purpose of the things themselves. 
Comes Csesar to the Capitol to-morrow 1 

This is the educated, cultivated man to whom, absorbed in 
literary and political interests, the wild games of Nature 
(who to his mind pursues her natural course even in 
storm) are of no importance. Just so might Burke or 
Darwin have looked on the elemental war. 

Neither does Cassius care a straw for the raging of the 
tempest, but not for Cicero's reason. The fury of hate in 
his heart is greater than the fury of the storm. The 
lightning and the elemental roar express his soul, and 
he walked in them with joy. He sees in the dreadful 
prodigies of the night the warning of Caesar's end — 
Heaven itself is speaking its wrath with Caesar. Then, 
as the tyrannic hate within him seeks fresh forms of 
expression, he says no longer that the storm is the 
message of divine wrath. It is itself the image of Caesar. 
It is he who is the dreadful night of Rome; it is he that 
thunders, lightens, opens graves, and roars like the lion 
in the Capitol. He is our fear and destruction. 

Finally the hate and envy of Cassius break out into that 
impassioned speech by which he bursts open the heart 



76 LECTURES ON SHAKESPEARE 

of Casca, and claims him as a brother in his envy — and 

in his conspiracy. 

And why should Caesar be a tyrant then ? 
Poor man ! I know he would not be a wolf 
But that he sees the Romans are but sheep : 
He were no lion, were not Romans hinds. 
Those that with haste will make a mighty fire 
Begin it with weak straws : what trash is Rome, 
What rubbish and what offal, when it serves 
For the base matter to illuminate 
So vile a thing as Caesar ! But, grief ! 
Where hast thou led me ? I perhaps speak this 
Before a willing bondman ; then I know 
My answer must be made. But I am arm'd, 
And dangers are to me indifferent. 

He ends by saying to Casca that c three parts of Brutus 

is ours already/ 

and the man entire 
Upon the next encounter yields him ours. 

This phrase, while it marks the slowness in the growth 

of Brutus's resolution, which Shakespeare has so carefully 

wrought out, introduces us to the next scene in which 

Brutus at last makes up his mind. The storm still goes 

on — 'the exhalations whizzing in the air' give light 

enough to read by — but the rain has ceased. Brutus is 

walking in his orchard, and the dawn is near at hand. 

He too has cared nothing for the storm. His soul is 

stormier, with its dreadful purpose, than are the heavens. 

Shakespeare lays bare this soul, restlessly ranging over 

motives, possibilities, casuistries, and settling finally into 

the resolve to slay for the general good the man he 

loves; not because Caesar has done anything as yet 

against liberty, but because he may — and, 'lest he may, 

I will prevent him.' What Caesar is, he says, if given 

greater power, 

Would run to these and these extremities : 
And therefore think him as a serpent's egg 
Which, hatch'd, would as his kind grow mischievous, 
And kill him in the shell. 



JULIUS (LESAR 77 

' Tis a mean argument ; and only a philosopher would use 
it and think it good. Once, during the soliloquy, the 
unphilosophic side of Brutus contradicts it — 

To speak truth of Caesar, 
I have not known when his affections sway'd 
More than his reason. 

Then he gets back to his mere philosophy, changing 
and shifting. 

Some say that in this soliloquy Brutus is unlike his 
previous character. But Shakespeare is representing a 
mind travelling over a host of arguments for and against 
the deed it considers. The disordered spirit of Brutus is 
tossed to and fro ; even now he cannot come to certainty. 
It needs to settle him down into full resolve, that Rome 
should call on him for help. And the sealed papers flung 
in at his window, crying to him to ' awake, and strike and 
redress, in the name of his great ancestor who drove out 
the Tarquin/ finally secure his resolution. Then he looks 
back on the long struggle, and in his loneliness paints 
the tempest of thought through which he has passed — 
marvellous words they are — half of the philosopher, half 
of the man who has loved Csesar, and not one line of a 
man of the world. 

Since Cassius first did whet me against Caesar 
I have not slept. 

Between the acting of a dreadful thing 
And the first motion, all the interim is 
Like a phantasma or a hideous dream : 
The Genius and the mortal instruments 
Are then in council, and the state of man, 
Like to a little kingdom, suffers then 
The nature of an insurrection. 

Now, when at last the mind of Brutus is free from 
doubt, the conspirators arrive. They are in the garden, 
the storm is dying away ; and the presentation to the eye 
of the whole scene is rendered more vivid by the little 



78 LECTURES ON SHAKESPEARE 

dialogue (while Brutus and Cassius talk apart) of Casca 
and Cinna about the part of the heaven where the sun 
arises. They talk of ' where the east is ' while they wait 
to arrange how the foremost man of all the world is to die. 
This is Shakespeare's way, as it is the way of human life, 
of mingling the common with the uncommon, the great 
with the small, the deeds which shake the world with a 
brawl at an inn in Eastcheap. 

Then Brutus, developing still more the high-mindedness 
of his character, will have no oath taken. No need for 
that if they are Romans who know they have an unselfish 
cause to maintain ; every drop of whose blood is guilty if 
they break their promise. This is far too lofty a strain for 
the conspirators, whom other motives drive. They do not 
even answer him. Such words as 

The even virtue of our enterprise 

must have struck cold on the passions of envious Casca 
and jealous Cassius. The loneliness of Brutus comes 
home to us. 

Then emerges also his folly as a politician. It is the 
retired student, engaged only in ideas, who speaks when it 
is proposed to slay Antony as well as Caesar. Our course, 
he says, would be too bloody then. "Would we could kill 
Caesar's spirit, and not Caesar. Mark Antony is nothing 
without Caesar. 

This is too childish-foolish for this world. Brutus has 
no eye for men, or for affairs. He never even thinks of 
Octavius. He has not measured the latent power of 
Antony, nor does he measure him justly after the 
murder. He hands the whole of Rome over to him when 
he lets him speak over Caesar's body. His position as 
a politician is ridiculous ; his position as a noble thinker 
is honourable. Caesar dead, Antony was not only Antony, 
but Caesar as well ; and Caesar is nowhere more alive than 



JULIUS OESAR 79 

when he sways the hearts of the Roman people in the 
speech of Antony. The only way the conspiracy could 
have succeeded was, once Caesar was slain, by the slaughter 
of those that loved Caesar. Napoleon understood that; 
so did Antony and Octavius. The tender-heartedness and 
the personal morality of Brutus were, in the circum- 
stances, fatal to his cause. All this is the careful drawing 
of Shakespeare, who did not work (as I have often said) 
with the careless indifference which some think an attri- 
bute of genius. 

Yet when we turn from the futile politician, and the 
philosopher ignorant of the world, to the man, with what 
charm does his tender-heartedness arrive ! The conspir- 
ators depart ; Brutus is left alone. He calls his attendant, 
Lucius. The boy is fast asleep. And Brutus, looking at 
him, loves his youth, and will not disturb him — 

Boy ! Lucius ! Fast asleep ! It is no matter ; 
Enjoy the honey-heavy dew of slumber : 
Thou hast no figures nor no fantasies, 
Which busy care draws in the brains of men ; 
Therefore thou sleep'st so sound. 

And this interlude of the tenderness which lay beneath 
the stoicism of Brutus is continued by the scene with 
Portia which instantly follows, and on which I have 
already commented. 

The morning comes, and we are placed in Caesar's 
house. The storm has not quite passed away, and the 
doomed man enters, to be met by his wife who urges him 
to stay from the Capitol. There is that which is terrible 
in the insolent pride Caesar shows throughout this scene. 
There is that which is pitiable in the weakness with 
which he yields to his wife, and then, when his pride is 
appealed to, to the conspirators. This kind of pride is 
the very top of weakness. All the evil omens are in vain. 
His pompous and inflated speeches, intolerable when he 



80 LECTURES ON SHAKESPEARE 

is speaking in the third person, seem to challenge the 

gods, and to despise all men but himself. Shakespeare, 

like a Greek dramatist, meant them to contain his fate 

and the cause of it. They partly explain the hatred and 

envy of Cassius and the rest; and it is a fine piece of 

art which thus modifies our horror of his murder by our 

natural dislike to this tone of haughty defiance. And in 

the death scene this is continued. His insolence becomes 

so great that it seems to claim the dagger. He says he 

will spurn ' like a cur ' the man who would alter his will. 

1 Hence ! ' he cries, as the conspirators press their suit 

upon him — ' Hence ! Wilt thou lift up Olympus ? ' Again 

Decius claims his friend's return from exile. Csesar 

answers, 

Doth not Brutus bootless kneel i 

This motives the last blow, and brings us up to it without 
too great a shock. 

Then follows the confusion of the conspirators, who do 
not know what to do; the dispersal of the people, and 
the conspirators left alone with their dead master. It is 
a wonderful scene ; at first they do nothing but shout — 

Liberty ! Freedom ! — Tyranny is dead ! 
Run hence, proclaim, cry it about the streets. 

It is almost like the shout of Caliban — as foolish at least 
as his. Brutus bids the Senators not to be affrighted. 
Casca tells Brutus to speak to the people. ' Where 's 
Antony, where 's Publius ? ' cry others. This is all these 
foolish persons think of doing after their momentous act. 
No prevision, nothing arranged, no measures for govern- 
ment, — and the whole world upturned ! 

Then they begin to talk, half-philosophic talk about 
life and death, and how their deed will be acted over on 
a future stage, as if they thought they were playing a 
tragedy, and had done nothing in reality. And Brutus, 
shaken to the centre of his stoicism, falls into melodrama 



JULIUS CLESAR 81 

quite outside his character ; bids them bathe their arms 
in Caesar's blood, wash them up to the elbows, smear 
their swords, and, waving their red weapons in the market- 
place, cry ' Peace, freedom, and liberty.' 

At first all this seems, in the bloody circumstance, 
unnatural. But, in reality, nothing can be better done 
than Shakespeare has here done. The inner agitation of 
the conspirators shows itself in these absurdities. They 
begin to feel that they have shaken the world. They 
have let loose forces they cannot manage, and terror and 
confusion seize on their heart and brain. They dare not 
give voice to the overwhelming dread. And they take 
refuge in this surface- talk, in these inane boastings ; even 
Brutus is shocked into melodrama. It is like Hamlet 
bursting into fantastic phrase after he has seen the ghost. 
It is almost a comfort when Antony — who is contending 
for his life, who knows what will follow on this deed, who 
sees the overthrow of Brutus and his own success, if only 
he can for a few hours secure his life from the conspir- 
ators' daggers — comes upon the scene. He is politic 
enough. He persuades Brutus that he will act with him. 
Cassius suspects him ; but Brutus imputes his own single- 
eyed love of liberty to Antony, and consents, like an 
idiot, to Antony's speaking at Csesar's funeral. Antony 
is nobly managed. Were he only the hypocrite, we should 
despise him. Shakespeare does not leave it so. Even 
though his life is on the card, he cannot help breaking out 
into pity and praise when he sees his master dead, but he 
manages to pass this off as an offering to friendship, while 
he agrees in principle with what has been done. In him, 
and in Brutus, craft and simplicity stand face to face, and 
both men are true to the character Shakespeare has made 
for them. As a politician Antony is wise and Brutus a fool. 
As a man Brutus is noble and Antony ignoble — and yet 
not quite ignoble. His personal love and wrath for his 

F 



82 LECTURES ON SHAKESPEARE 

friend, arising continually through his deceiving speeches, 
redeem him in our eyes. At last, he is left alone with 
the dead, and the long repressed rage bursts forth in that 
impassioned address to the pierced body of Caesar, 
wherein, in the last words, we see beforehand what is 
coming, when 

Caesar's spirit ranging for revenge, 
With Ate by his side come hot from hell, 
Shall in these confines with a monarch's voice 
Cry ' Havoc,' and let slip the dogs of war. 

One catastrophe has been — the death of Caesar ; but out 
of death Caesar rises again, an avenging spirit. Another 
catastrophe, the death of Brutus, is at hand. It is the 
true catastrophe of the play — the overthrow of the 
Republican, the triumph of the Imperial, form of 
government. Caesar, in Antony, does this, and Caesar's 
true revenge is the victory of his idea. 

The second scene closes the third Act. It is the scene 
of the speeches in the Forum. The speech of Brutus 
is entirely in character, doctrinaire, sententious ; con- 
vinced, even to a touch of vanity, of his Tightness ; 
so convinced that he does not doubt the people being of 
his opinion (imputing his own thoughts to every man in 
the crowd) ; so convinced that he begs them, for his sake, 
to hear Antony. In every phrase Shakespeare writes 
down the folly of the man, his unimaginable unfitness 
to lead, to convince, or to understand a mob of citizens 
whom an imperialistic policy had debauched with gifts. 
Nevertheless, they cheer Brutus when he has done! 
Then Shakespeare, with one imaginative touch, makes 
it clear that they have completely misunderstood the 
action and the speech of Brutus. 

All. Live, Brutus ! live, live ! 

1 Cit. Bring him with triumph home unto his house. 

2 Cit. Give him a statue with his ancestors. 

3 Cit. Let him be Ccesar. 



JULIUS CAESAR 83 

Listen to that ; the people wish to make him that which 
he hopes he has destroyed. He has slain Caesar that 
there may be no more Caesars. ' Let him be Caesar/ is the 
answer of the mob. Alone, alone, Brutus goes away, the 
fool of fancy, self-deceived. 

Then Antony begins the speech that every schoolboy 
knows. It is charged with contempt of the mob. He 
plays on them as a musician on an instrument. The 
subtle changes of his speech, from praise of the con- 
spirators — harmonising himself with the impression 
Brutus has made on the crowd — to praise of Caesar, 
dropping the first as he feels his listeners coming into 
sympathy with the second ; his personal grief for Caesar 
breaking forth into tears that win him the sympathy of 
the people, and finally impassionate them into love of 
Caesar ; his careful, reiterated appeal to their curiosity by 
his reserve with regard to Caesar's will till he has lashed 
them into insatiable eagerness ; his final appeal to their 
hatred of ingratitude, the vice the people have always 
hated most; his exhibition of the dead body to their 
eyes: ' Look, look and pity' — are one and all most masterly, 
and, as we read, it is finally the mighty intelligence of 
Shakespeare that impresses us more than even the mighty 
events of the history. The last appeal, with its fascin- 
ating touch of narrative — with its linking of each separate 
wound to the name of a conspirator — is full of a splendid 
knowledge of the way to excite a people : — 

If you have tears, prepare to shed them now. 

Then comes that astonishing scene, in which Antony 
lashes the excitement of the mob into fury, in which we 
seem to see and hear the tumult growing, swelling, raging, 
till the Forum roars ; till all Rome is so filled with mad- 
ness of wrath that the mob slays Cinna the poet because 
he bears the name of Cinna the conspirator ; — and Antony, 



84 LECTURES ON SHAKESPEARE 

left alone, while the mob rush forth to burn and slay, 
caps it all with triumphant cynicism — 

Now, let it work. Mischief, thou art afoot, 
Take thou what course thou wilt. 

The rest, the fourth and fifth Acts of the play, are con- 
cerned with the fall of Brutus and the conspirators. The 
interest lessens slowly but steadily, till it dies away 
almost altogether in the fifth Act. It is only the interest 
of a death-bed ; of the last and convulsive effort of Roman 
Republicanism, wounded to the death by the slaying of 
Caesar, to live again. 

It is a pity, I think, that the story of this slow departure 
was extended over two Acts. They had to be spun out 
by needless interludes, such as the intrusion of the poet, 
and the interview of the opponents before the battle ; and 
the last Act might well, by some condensation of the 
suicides of the conspirators, have been brought into the 
fourth Act. But I am too bold in saying this. 

There are, however, two great sources of interest in 
both the Acts. One is the overbrooding of Caesar's 
spirit — the master, though dead, of all the events and of 
all the characters. He still overstrides the world. This 
is marked out by Shakespeare in different ways. 

In that remarkable first scene of the fourth Act, where 
Lepidus and Octavius are sketched (waiting for their 
full conception and finish in Antony and Cleopatra), the 
world that Caesar ruled alone is divided into three. 

' Did not great Julius bleed for justice' sake ? ' Brutus 
cries in the midst of his quarrel with Cassius. 

1 When Caesar lived,' cries Cassius, ' he durst not thus 
have moved me.' c Strike as thou didst at Caesar,' he 
cries again, when he bares his breast to Brutus. The 
dead man is an overshadowing third in that interview. 

Again, before the end, to Brutus alone in his tent, the 



JULIUS C^SAR 85 

ghost of Caesar enters, and the iron soul of Brutus is dis- 
tempered. His hair stares and his blood is cold. The 
spirit is the fierce presentation to his eyes of that which 
always fills his mind. Were not an atmosphere created 
by the besetting thought, the ghost of Caesar could not 
have appeared. 

In the parley between the chiefs, Antony drives home 
the murder of Caesar to their souls with bitter words. 

As Cassius dies, he calls on Caesar — 'Caesar, thou art 
revenged.' 

When Brutus is resolved to die, Caesar is with him — 

The ghost of Caesar hath appear'd to me 
Two several times by night : at Sardis once, 
And this last night here in Philippi fields : 
I know my hour is come. 

And as he runs upon his sword, his last cry is — 

Caesar, now be still : 
I kill'd not thee with half so good a will. 

The second interest is the further development of the 
characters of Brutus and Cassius. The unfitness of 
Brutus for public affairs is now, in these last acts, fully 
expanded. Even in the midst of the storm of events, 
Shakespeare with careful finish paints Brutus as still the 
reader of books, the philosopher of the study. When the 
Council of War is over he resumes the book he has been 
reading ; he carries it in the pocket of his gown — 

Let me see, let me see : is not the leaf turn'd down 
Where I left reading ? Here it is, I think. 

Then, having made us think of Brutus as a student, he 
develops further his unfitness, as such, for public affairs. 
Brutus claims to be a better captain, a better soldier than 
Cassius — which he is not. He gives the wrong advice 
before the battle. He loses the battle itself by his 
hasty action. Because he is absolutely convinced of his 



86 LECTURES ON SHAKESPEARE 

moral Tightness he thinks that he is also certain to be 
right in the ruling of events — an egregious folly of which 
history affords many an example — and it is probable 
Shakespeare meant us to understand this, when, having 
overcome the wise advice of Cassius to wait a day at least 
before joining battle, Brutus backs up his mistaken view 
by that well-known passage — 

There is a tide in the affairs of men 

Which taken at the flood leads on to fortune ; 

Omitted, all the voyage of their life 

Is bound in shallows and in miseries. 

On such a full sea are we now afloat, 

And we must take the current when it serves, 

Or lose our ventures. 

The statement is good philosophy ; but Brutus misapplies 
it to the affair in hand. On the rock of its half truth 
he wrecked his ship. He mistook the tide. Had he 
waited, as Cassius advised, he might have caught the 
flood. As it was, he took the ebb and thought it was the 
flood. That is one development of the character — an in- 
crease, under the fierce pressure of circumstance, of the 
original weakness of the thinker when pushed into prac- 
tical affairs. On the other hand, the gentle affectionate- 
ness, especially in friendship, which underlies the stoicism 
of Brutus, also increases and is developed into charm. 
Portia's death smites his heart, but it softens its outgoings. 
Defeat and the ruin of his cause are met with Stoic 
courage, but it is a new thing to find that they strengthen 
the deep loving-kindness of his nature. Brutus gains a 
double soul in Shakespeare's hands. A similar develop- 
ment is wrought in Cassius. He too in great trouble wins 
back his soul. Gentleness, lovingness in friendship, a 
gracious humility, are born in him. It is easy to illustrate 
these changes. The celebrated quarrel of Brutus and 
Cassius is, as it were, a study of friendship ; and Shake- 
speare almost suggests this when Lucilius tells Brutus 



JULIUS (LESAR 87 

how Cassius received him — with courtesy, but not with 
the old familiar freedom. Brutus answers — 

Thou hast described 
A hot friend cooling ; ever note, Lucilius, 
When love begins to sicken and decay, 
It useth an enforced ceremony. 
There are no tricks in plain and simple faith : 

This is close to the philosophic sententiousness of Brutus, 
and the little dialogue, in Shakespeare's preparing way, 
sounds beforehand one of the clear notes of that scene 
between Brutus and Cassius, to which he means to give 
his full strength. 

I need not enter closely into it. It is almost a house- 
hold word; and it is most nobly conceived and ex- 
pressed. But I mark a few things — Cassius, pressed by 
the times, has used tricks of policy, and supported 
bribery. This is quite in his character as Shakespeare 
conceives it at the beginning of the play. There he is 
shown as believing in the corruptibility of all men. He 
is now himself corrupt. It is a natural development. 
He who believes in any evil being universal in men 
ends by himself practising that evil. 

Brutus meets this immoral expediency in his friend 
with stern rebuke. He is not modern but ancient Rome ; 
and Cassius feels that with so honest a leader their last 
chance of success is lost. But since all is lost, he cannot 
bear that Brutus and he shall not be friends. In the 
ruin that at least shall be kept. This tragic motive is 
slightly but clearly wrought. 

Then there is a fierceness in the words of Brutus which 
is greater than the error of Cassius deserved. Why is 
the Stoic unjust ? We know why when we hear Brutus 
say, ' Portia is dead.' That which was behind the words — 
the bitter grief within — made the words of Brutus fiercer 
than justice demanded. 



88 LECTURES ON SHAKESPEARE 

Again, we have seen Cassius, as yet, in an unamiable 
light. He has been the envy-ridden man, grim, harsh, 
and scornful. Now, that he is about to die, we are shown 
the depth of his heart. The reproaches of Brutus break 
through the ice of his angry experience. They might 
have made him furious ; they make him as tender as 
Brutus. The divine genius of Shakespeare thus lifts 
him into our pity and affection. For the rest of the play 
he has left all his old nature behind him — that envious 
aigreur which had grown over him like a crust ; and he 
becomes that which he probably was as a young man. 
This recurrence (when the end of life draws near) to that 
which a man was before he was spoiled awry by the 
world, is not unfrequent in experience, but few writers 
have used it as Shakespeare, who loved us, has used it 
in his plays. Cassius thinks of his birthday, reviews his 
life, and is content to die since he has failed. He was a 
sceptic ; now he is partly superstitious : — 

You know that I held Epicurus strong, 
And his opinion ; now I change my mind. 

He was old in heart ; now he is fresh in spirit ; and 
resolved, like a young man, to meet all perils constantly. 
Nothing can be more tender, with more of the grace of 
a boy, than his farewell to Brutus — 

For ever and for ever farewell, Brutus ! 
If we do meet again, we '11 smile indeed ; 
If not, 'tis true this parting was well made. 

And then he dies, and Shakespeare, in his poetic 
fashion, makes Nature sympathise with his fall — 

setting sun, 
As in thy red rays thou dost sink to-night, 
So in his red blood Cassius' day is set, 
The Sun of Rome is set ! 

And Brutus speaks his epitaph — 



JULIUS CESAR 89 

The last of all the Romans, fare thee well ! 

It is impossible that ever Rome 

Should breed thy fellow. Friends, I owe more tears 

To this dead man than you shall see me pay. 

I shall find time, Cassius, I shall find time. 

With that last line, beyond all praise in its thought- 
embracing beauty of love, Brutus is left alone. He fights 
to the end in a second battle. But the day goes against 
him, and for the moment his stern self-restraint is broken 
through. It was wonderful of Shakespeare to mark this 
momentary rush of excited physical passion, conquering, 
in the heat of battle, his stoicism. Cato runs into the 
fight shouting like a madman — 

I am the son of Marcus Cato, ho ! 

A foe to tyrants, and my country's friend ; 

I am the son of Marcus Cato, ho ! 

Brutus bursts forth, for the first and last time, into a 
similar excitement — 

And I am Brutus, Marcus Brutus, I ; 

Brutus, my country's friend ; know me for Brutus. 

And he rushes into the battle. That violation of his 
character is a piece of pure truth. 

And now the end is come. The great mistake, political 
not moral, is closed in death. Caesar has conquered. 
'Caesar, now be still,' Brutus cries as he runs upon 
his sword. As he looks back, his tenderness and his 
conviction of the rightness of his cause are both 
undiminished. 

Countrymen, 
My heart doth joy that yet in all my life 
I found no man but he was true to me. 

No words are more loving, nor more nobly proud. The 
rest is of his cause, and it is Shakespeare's comment on 
his own conception of Brutus — 



90 LECTURES ON SHAKESPEARE 

I shall have glory by this losing day, 

More than Octavius and Mark Antony 

By this vile conquest shall attain unto. 

So, fare you well at once ; for Brutus' tongue 

Hath almost ended his life's history : 

Night hangs upon mine eyes ; my bones would rest, 

That have but labour'd to attain this hour. 

Even his enemies thought more highly of him than he 
thought of himself. They mark his isolation; his care 
only for the common good, not for himself; his tender- 
ness, the many-sided fulness of the man. 

This was the noblest Eoman of them all : 

All the conspirators, save only he, 

Did that they did in envy of great Cassar ; 

He only, in a general honest thought 

And common good to all, made one of them. 

His life was gentle, and the elements 

So mix'd in him, that Nature might stand up 

And say to all the world, ' This was a man.' 

It is Antony says that. It is Antony's plain condem- 
nation. 



IV 
HAMLET 

I do not suppose that there is any product of modern 
genius that has been more written about, or created a 
greater curiosity than Hamlet The Divina Commedia 
may perhaps, at those points, rank with it, but both derive 
the eager impulse they have given to curious search, and 
to the impulse to write about them, first from the extra- 
ordinary simplicity of the main lines of humanity in each 
character they delineate, and secondly from the equally ex- 
traordinary variety and subtlety with which, always within 
those simple lines, each separate character is imaged and 
wrought into a living soul. 

The simple lines, for example, on which the characters 
of Hamlet, the King, Horatio, Ophelia, and the Queen are 
drawn, and on which the plot is made, are within the 
comprehension of the most uneducated intellect, and for 
this reason, as well as for the striking simplicity of the 
mise en scene, we find that Hamlet is as great a favourite 
with the gallery as with the stalls, with the village audience 
in a barn as with an audience of academies ; when it is 
acted by a strolling company, or by the leading actors of 
England, Germany, or France. Every one understands the 
story, is interested in its action and characters, in the 
vivid and fatal movement of it. A child would compre- 
hend the outline of Hamlet's story. An alert boy or girl, 
on seeing the play, would probably ask the same questions 
we ask. Did Hamlet believe the Ghost ? Was he really in 
love with Ophelia ? Why did he talk such nonsense and 

91 



92 LECTURES ON SHAKESPEARE 

such sense together ? If he thought the King had really- 
murdered his father, why did he not kill the King at once ? 
Was he mad or only pretending ? These and many others 
are simple questions which naturally arise. And I am 
not sure whether the answers to them are not quite simple 
also. They would be so, if Shakespeare had not troubled 
our answers and confused our minds with his addition 
to the simple outlines of the most subtle and complex 
representation of the thoughts and feelings of the 
characters. The more we hear of their inner life, the less 
are we able to say clearly why they did this or that ; the 
more subtle and the less simple seems the true answer to 
the questions. 

Within the simple outlines is the filling up of the out- 
lines — the delineation of the inner life of men and women 
— all that lies silent behind the action — and this is like an 
Oriental web for fineness, for involution of pattern, for 
delicacy of line, for subtlety of change and colour, for a 
bewildering crossing and intercrossing of thoughts, motives, 
passions, arguments, intuitions, imaginations, impulses, 
reasoned conclusions, unreasoned dreams and driftings, 
sane thoughts which adopt the expressions of insanity, 
insane wanderings like Ophelia's in the sub-conscious 
world, and the terrible mixture, as in the King, of the 
terrors of conscience and the consolations of self-deceit. 
These are but a few of the inmates of the inner world of 
the human soul which Shakespeare opens to us, and 
chiefly in the soul of Hamlet, who is the heightened 
concentration into one sensitive person of the main 
characteristics of thought and action in one of the great 
types into which humanity may be divided. An im- 
measurable variety then exists within the simplicities of 
this drama. 

There is another thing to say in this connection. Ham- 
let is supposed to be entirely different, both in intellectual 



HAMLET 93 

power and in strangeness of phantasy and feelings, from 
the common run of educated men — to be in a class apart. 
It is not really so, and one proof of that is that so many 
hundreds of thousands of men and women, when they 
listen to him, listen to their own souls. The thoughts he 
has they have had ; the imaginative dreams and fancies he 
expresses have passed through their minds. The questions 
he puts to life, the questionings he has had about death, 
those he has about suicide when he is alone; the im- 
patience he has with the troubles he is called upon to face, 
and the demands which they make upon him ; the impulses 
he has to perform the demands and to battle with the 
troubles; the fading of those impulses as fresh thoughts 
occur to him and make him glad to forget them — are all 
common to millions of men and women who belong to the 
pensive, sensitive, imaginative, contemplative, idealising 
type of humanity, which thinks rather than acts, is quiet 
rather than stirring, dreaming rather than practical ; to 
whom the soul is more than the body, the mystic more 
than the material life. Wherever persons of that type 
exist, in poverty or in riches, among peasants or princes, 
we find Hamlet, and they find themselves in Hamlet. 
And the wonder of the play consists not in the mental 
apartness of Hamlet from the rest of the world, but in the 
amazing power of the poet who made him, who embodied 
in him the representation of one million-peopled type of 
humanity; who made him so act, so speak, that he set 
before us not only the type, but almost all the variations 
within that type, almost all the main directions of their 
thoughts and feelings about the life of man. Shakespeare 
himself, not Hamlet, is the marvel. There are millions of 
Hamlets, but one Shakespeare. Moreover, the thoughts 
Hamlet expresses are not of exceptional range or excellence. 
They do not set him on a pinnacle above other men. They 
are, as thoughts alone, the ordinary thoughts of his type 



1 



94 LECTURES ON SHAKESPEARE 

in a cultivated youth with a turn for philosophy. What 
does make his thoughts apparently greater and deeper than 
those of other young men of his temperament is the noble 
: passion of their clothing, the splendour of words, like that of 
a starry heaven, by which they are made to seem uncommon, 
t is not a creature of deep philosophic thinking that we 
have in Hamlet ; it is an undeveloped poet who adds to 
all he thinks and feels the spirit of a nimble and im- 
passioned imagination which no one else in the play 
possesses, so that he shapes into splendid form thoughts, 
feelings, and problems common in the talk of educated 
young men, and makes them seem much greater than 
they really are. 

There is the other type, containing also many diverse 
forms — the active, practical, quick-deciding, dry-thinking 
type, who use their intellect on the business of the world, 
on the investigation of natural or social phenomena ; who 
put aside sentiment, who sometimes make love an episode ; 
to whom this outward world is all ; whom trouble does not 
much affect save to inspire them to get it out of the way ; 
who recognise duty and do it often well, but who work it 
so as to increase their money or their reputation ; to whom 
all dreaming is repulsive, all drifting a disgrace, all doubt 
a folly, all imagination and its works, not business, but 
entertainment for the moment ; who rarely stay to ques- 
tion life, but do make it their own ; who think of death 
as infinitely distant, till they grow old ; who have no 
time to consider the world to come if it should occur 
to their mind ; who think a man a fool who dreams of 
suicide; who sometimes recognise what is called the 
ideal, but are bored by it; who make intellect the judge 
of all questions ; to whom the sensible is the real and 
the spiritual the unreal ; and who, if they were put into 
their own soul, and forced to see it, would cry out with 
great naivete, ' What is this place ! where am I ? ' 



HAMLET 95 

This type (of a thousand more forms than I have 
indicated) is represented also by millions and millions of 
men and women in all the ranks of life, and not one of 
them can comprehend the Hamlet type. Claudius, till 
Hamlet made him afraid, the Queen, till Hamlet pierced 
her conscience, Polonius, Laertes, Ophelia till she became 
mad, belonged to this type ; Hamlet and Horatio to the 
other. 

Well, when a person of the one type meets a person of 
the other, and both are strong examples, each of his own 
type, neither of them can understand the other ; and the 
easiest way to express their want of comprehension is to 
say: 'This person is mad, or half mad' — just what 
Polonius and the King and Queen and Ophelia, but not 
Horatio, said of Hamlet; just what a number of the critics 
of this play — more or less, 'in proportion as they belong 
to the type opposite to his — have said about him. They 
draw attention to many acts and words of Hamlet as 
tainted with madness ; and the most eager to prove this 
point, and their own acumen, are the specialists in insanity 
who, believing themselves to be an unanswerable authority 
on what is madness and what is not, are the very blindest 
and most foolish of guides in this matter — men, some 
of whom at least, if they had their way, would end by 
shutting up in asylums all the poets, artists, and prophets, 
all the men and women who do not care for money, who 
are bored by science, and who think that the real fools 
are those who care for the things of this world. 

These sapient folk are sure that Hamlet was mad, or all 
but mad ; and do not ask themselves whether Shakespeare 
meant him to be mad, or why Horatio never thought him 
mad, or on the verge of madness ; or whether a madman 
can be so sequent as he is in all that he says, or so con- 
tinuously intelligent along with a weakened brain. At 
last, driven by a kind of demon, they end (like some of 



96 LECTURES ON SHAKESPEARE 

the brain investigators of the present day) by saying 
that any extraordinary imaginative power, which works 
beyond the sphere of the analytic reason, is itself madness. 
All men of genius are mad, genius itself is a kind of 
madness. 

Amazingly funny that is ! And when we hear it, all that 
is left for us to say is : ' That, in a world where the 
humorist is at a discount, and where due reasons for 
gaiety are only too few,, it is very kind of Providence to 
make men so amusing. If genius is a madness, Hamlet 
was mad, but the maddest man that ever lived in 
England was Shakespeare, who made Hamlet.' 

The fact is that Shakespeare never intended to represent 
Hamlet as mad or half mad or verging on madness. He 
expressly made him a feigner of madness, and when he 
wished to represent real madness and to contrast it with/ . 
feigned madness, he created the real madness of Ophelia^ 
and did it with wonderful truth and skill. There is not 
a trace of madness in Hamlet. There is plenty of eccen- 
tricity, plenty of fantastic thought and feeling, plenty of 
wandering and roving imagination, plenty of wild and 
even whirling phrases, and of those phrases which grow 
out of a consciousness of a world beyond that of the 
senses, into which consciousness penetrates unaware — 
which, heard of by those who, like the specialists, are 
looking out for madness, are quite sufficient to induce 
them to suggest an asylum. Fancy a mad doctor asked 
by Claudius or Polonius about Hamlet, hearing him 
say a propos de rien, * I could be bounded in a nutshell 
and think myself king of infinite space, had I not bad 
dreams. 5 What would he say, shaking his foolish head ? 
' Sire, with the deepest regret, I am of opinion that 
Prince Hamlet is suffering from cerebral disease, likely, 
at any moment, to become dangerous.' But if Horatio 
were present, he would say : ' What an ass the man is ! 



HAMLET 97 

What does he know ? The Prince has thought this and 
talked of the idea in it a hundred times at Wittenberg.' 
And the same thing may be said of all the phrases which 
are used to prove the madness of Hamlet. These things, 
in a man to whom the soul is more than sense, who lives 
within rather than without, are not madness ; otherwise 
almost half the world in which we live is mad. Moreover 
— when he lives in the outer world — Hamlet always knows 
what he is about ; always sees his position clearly, always 
reasons, with following and linking intelligence, his point ; 
always understands himself and his world, never gambols 
away from his thought on to another at the sound of a 
word as Ophelia does ; and in all his soliloquies, however 
strange and apart from worldly life his thought, makes his 
meaning clear. After all, the main question with regard 
to this matter is — not whether Hamlet was mad or half 
mad, or not mad at all — but whether Shakespeare meant 
him to be mad — and to that there is but one answer 
possible. For my own part, those passages of thought 
which are used to prove that he was mad contain the 
wisest and deepest things he says ; and those actions of 
his which are used to prove the same theory obey a 
higher law of reason than any mere logician has ever 
conceived. 

How did Shakespeare imagine Hamlet? That is the 
real question. And, perhaps, the most interesting way of 
answering that question is not to isolate Hamlet's character 
for separate consideration, but to go through the play with 
him, taking up, along with him, the other characters, and 
the events which develop him and them. It is difficult to 
embody that in a single lecture, but it may be attempted. 

The play opens about a month after the funeral of 
Hamlet's father, shortly after his mother had married 
King Claudius, his uncle, with 'most wicked speed.' 

G 



98 LECTURES ON SHAKESPEARE 

Hamlet had come over to Elsinore to his father's burial, 
and had with infinite disgust been present at his mother's 
marriage. He had been at Wittenberg, at the University, 
and had made a close student-friendship there with 
Horatio, whom he had left behind him, but who now, after 
a month's absence, has arrived at Elsinore. He had then 
been a student, with all the fresh ideals, and crude 
thoughts, and passionate hopes, and imaginative depres- 
sions, which belong to a young man of his type at the 
University. /We see from his after- talk that his mind 
lived chiefly among those metaphysical questions which 
are so often the delight and eagerness of a young man. { 
It is plain that he was an indweller of his own soul ; that 
the outward world was visionary to him rather than real ; 
that, thus dwelling chiefly in his soul, all the. questions 
which belong to life and death, to the purposes of the one, 
and to what lay beyond the other ; and all the depressions 
and excitements which cross and recross such an inner 
life — were his. This was his secret, sacred, hidden world. 
In this was his action, his thought, his passion. 

There are in the Universities now — and elsewhere also 
— thousands of young men and women of a similar type, 
and living the same kind of honourable and secret life in 
the imaginative world of the spirit. And when, as in 
Shakespeare's time, a flood of new literature (filled and 
vibrating with new thought, and moved from without by 
the winds of a general national excitement) is let loose on 
the world, there are even a greater number of such young 
men, alive with the same spirit, swimming in such a flood, 
and blown on by such a genial wind. Shakespeare met 
them every day ; he may — even now in his maturity — have 
become one of them and written this play out of that 
new experience. 

In Hamlet at the beginning of this play, he realised 
himself and them. And now, he takes this silent, 






/ 



HAMLET 99 

reserved, meditative, unworldly questioner of his own 
soul, of human life and of death, this inexperienced 
student, ignorant, except by hearsay, of crime and sin, 
unaccustomed to action, untrained in its struggles but 
accustomed to abstract thought, with only one friend to 
whom he speaks freely or at ease — and suddenly places 
him in the midst of terrible events, face to face with an 
awful revenge which duty seems to demand of him ; with 
a father's murder, with a mother's incest blackening his 
life; with war threatening in the distance, with a wild 
and drunken court, such as seemed savagery to the quiet 
student. 

His whole life was upturned; the very bottom of his 
soul was shocked and stained; out of his quiet he was 
flung into a filthy tempest ! Every nerve must have been 
strained to the utmost, every fibre of his thought and 
feeling violated. Instead of metaphysical peace, unutter- 
able disgust dwelt in his soul. That is what Shakespeare 
meant us to realise. His hatred and disgust of life begins 
before he knows that his father has been murdered. It 
is caused by the marriage of his mother to his satyr of 
an uncle within a month of his father's death. It is 
caused by the vile and wild disorder of the Court, by the 
revolt of his quiet soul against it, and by this drunken 
licence of mirth over his father's grave. The wrath and 
sorrow of this set him apart, and here his soul is opened, 
in this first soliloquy, in which his horror of the change 
from the meditative quiet of Wittenberg to the foul world 
of Elsinore is set before us. It is long, but it must be 
read. Kemember, it is before he knows of his uncle's 
murder of his father — before the demand for vengeance 
is made upon him. 

0, that this too too solid flesh would melt, 

Thaw, and resolve itself into a dew ! 

Or that the Everlasting had not fix'd 

His canon 'gainst self-slaughter ! God ! God ! 




100 LECTURES ON SHAKESPEARE 

How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable 

Seem to me all the uses of this world ! 

Fye on 't ! ah fye ! 'tis an unweeded garden, 

That grows to seed ; things rank and gross in nature 

Possess it merely. That it should come to this ! 

But two months dead ! nay, not so much, not two ; 

So excellent a king ; that was, to this, 

Hyperion to a satyr : so loving to my mother, 

That he might not beteeni the winds of heaven 

Visit her face too roughly. Heaven and earth ! 

Must I remember ? Why, she would hang on him, 

As if increase of appetite had grown 

By what it fed on : And yet, within a month — 

Let me not think on 't— ^Frailty, thy name is woman !-* 

A little month, or ere those shoes were old 

With which she follow'd my poor father's body, 

Like Niobe, all tears : — why she, even she, — 

God ! a beast, that wants discourse of reason 

Would have mourn'd longer, — married with my uncle, 

My father's brother, but no more like my father 

Than I to Hercules : within a month ; 

Ere yet the salt of most unrighteous tears 

Had left the flushing in her galled eyes, . 

She married. O, most wicked speed, to post 

With such dexterity to incestuous sheets ! 

It is not, nor it cannot come to good ; 

But break, my heart, for I must hold my tongue ! 

For a whole month this has been simmering in his 
heart and brain. Only two things have relieved the 
oppression of the accursed situation in which he was 
placed. First, his love for the innocent grace of Ophelia, 
and, secondly, his habit, nursed by his quiet life in the past, 
of sliding away from any outward event or condition 
of things on to some river of meditative or abstract 
thought in which the actual present is forgotten, even 
does not exist for him. This is constant throughout the 
play. As constant is the way in which, suddenly recalled 
to the present, he bounds as it were out of his reverie into 
surprised contact with the actual world. 

This is how Shakespeare first represents him. The quiet 
student plunged into hateful noises, the young, even the 



HAMLET 101 

innocent thinker and idealist plunged into events, the 

loathing and horror of which never leave him till he dies. 

On the top of this — to double the trouble of his heart, to 

add the supernatural to the natural horror, to bring his 

young soul into murder and lust among those nearest to 

him — his father's ghost appears to him at dead midnight. 

The play opens with that vision, seen by others, in scenery 

as fitting as it is effective. The guard is being relieved on 

the platform above the sea. The night is cold ; the stars 

are bright 

When yond same star that 's westward from the pole 
Had made his course to illume that part of heaven 
Where now it burns — 

Horatio, Bernardo and Marcellus see the stately shade of 
buried Denmark stalk by their watch. They speak to it ; 
its appearance makes Horatio, the scholar, recall the por- 
tents which foretold great Julius's fall, and the classic touch 
sketches the type of the man. It crosses their watch again. 
Horatio appeals to it with passion. The cock crows, and 
it vanishes away. The scenery of the night is imaged to 
our eyes in lovely poetry, and all the imaginative sugges- 
tions that the coming morning brings, and the voice of the 
bird of dawning. No more delightful words were ever 
written to suggest the growing light, the dewy freshness 
of the dawn, than these two lines which add to the 
beetling cliff, the platform and the sea, the vision of the 
eastern hills now tinged with the colour of the northern 
skies — russet, not golden. 

But look, the morn, in russet mantle clad, 
Walks o'er the dew of yon high eastward hill. 

They tell the tale to Hamlet. The condition of mind I 
have sketched appears in his welcome of Horatio, his 
memory of Wittenberg, his bitter references to his mother's 
wedding, his scoff at the drunkenness of the court, and his 
misery at this, and at his father's loss — 



r 



102 LECTURES ON SHAKESPEARE 

Would I had met ruy dearest foe in heaven 
Or ever I had seen that day, Horatio ! 
My father ! — rnethinks I see rny father. 

And the word introduces in the easiest way the story of the 
Ghost. ' where, rny Lord ? ' cries Horatio, full of what he 
had seen. ' In my mind's eye, Horatio,' answers Hamlet ; 
and the unconscious phrase adds to the breathless expecta- 
tion of the audience. I know nothing better in drama 
than the conversation which follows. Its ease is as great 
as its passion ; its vividness as its clearness. Hamlet's 
self-control, his trouble, his doubt, his intense, even his 
contemplative questioning on every point of the appear- 
ance, as if it sometimes seemed to him only a story with 
which he had a vague connection, and to which he was 
listening ; his resolution at the close — 

If it assume my noble father's person, 

I '11 speak to it, though hell itself should gape 

And bid me hold my peace ; 

his demand for silence — all his long disturbance within 
and his hatred of what he has seen creating in him the 
sense of some hidden evil — 

My father's spirit in arms ! all is not well : 
I doubt some foul play. 

All, all is as admirable in conception as it is in execution ; 
most certain, in its dramatic appeal and passion, to awake 
excitement and expectation in the veriest rustic in the 
dullest village in England. 

I pass over the third Scene for the moment. The 
fourth is at midnight again on the platform ; the moon is 
in the sky, and the air bites shrewdly; it is very cold. 
Hamlet is come to meet his father's spirit. As he waits, 
he hears the sound of the revel in the castle where the 
King drinks deep. ' Is it a custom ? ' asks Horatio — and 
Hamlet (apparently forgetting that which he has come to 
see), slides off from his blame of these drinking habits into 



HAMLET 103 

a meditative disquisition on the way in which one par- 
ticular fault in men (not necessarily of their own, rather 
of nature's making) spoils their whole lives, takes the pith 
and marrow out of them. No actor should leave out this 
passage, nor forget to represent Hamlet as gliding away 
from the present into a reasoning in his soul on a question A 
which suddenly presents itself to him. It is one of the 
key-notes of his character. This is the first example of 
that habit on which I have already dwelt. In the very 
centre of vital events, of times of crisis, he slips into such 
questioning thought as filled his student days. He forgets! 
all about the Ghost in an academic question. He ought 
to be thrilling with expectation. He has wandered away 
into a vague disquisition on the force of habit. To 
omit this passage in acting the play is to lose the intensity 
of Hamlet's surprise at the apparition, the reason of his 
overwhelming terror, and the uncontrolled passion of his 
speech. He has been in the contemplative life of Witten- 
berg. He is plunged into the hell of Elsinore, from 
abstract dreaming to dreadful reality in a moment. 

The same sliding away into argumentative thought — 
the same sudden shock out of it into the actual world, 
occur again and again throughout the play. Even here, 
after the first surprise, after the trembling passion, his 
unconquerable questioning, his doubts of the reality of 
things seen and heard, his forge tfulness, in side issues of 
thought, of what has been and is, seize upon him, and he 
wavers to and fro like a tree in the wind. He is shaken 
by the sight 'with thoughts beyond the reaches of 
his soul.' 

Say, why is this ? wherefore ? what should we do ? 

The Ghost beckons him away. Horatio urges him not to 
follow. What does Hamlet care ? Nothing the ghost can 
do can be worse than his life, which, now transferred from 



104 LECTURES ON SHAKESPEARE 

peace and meditation into the vile turmoil of a hateful 
world, is worthless to him. 

I do not set my life at a pin's fee. 

And his soul, Hamlet's only reality, being immortal as 

any ghost, cannot be injured. 
Again, it is characteristic of these dreaming, self-centred 

children of pure thought, that, when action is suddenly 
demanded of them, when they find themselves swept 
into the whirl of it, they rush into it with a far greater 
intensity than the man who has been accustomed to the 
movement of the world, who, trained to action, knows 
how to act. Such a man is quiet, collects himself, waits 
to understand before he acts ; and the violent words and 
actions of Hamlet when he throws off his detaining 
friends would not have been used by him. His action 
would have been steady and continuous. Hamlet's excite- 
ment towards action is intense and whirling ; but again 
it dies down as quickly as it rose. Thought, questioning, 
doubt, reasoning resume their sway. The native hue 

Of resolution is sicklied o'er 
With the pale cast of thought. 

He cannot make up his mind as to whether the Ghost was 
really his father's, was a truth- teller, was not a devil. 
And he hovers to and fro, miserable in his confusion, 
hating and scorning life because it is not at peace — till he 
gets things clear at last after the play in which he proves 
the guilt of the King. Meanwhile, here, with the Ghost, 
he is on the very peak of excitement, every nerve strained 
to intensity by the terrible story, by the demand on him 
for revenge, and by the contact with the supernatural. 
The story gives consistency to the vague sense of trouble 
so long lodged in his thought. 

my prophetic soul ! 
My uncle ! 



HAMLET 105 

It makes the whole world even fouler than he thought ; 
it stains his mother black, so that a son can cry — 

O most pernicious woman ! 

Yet it is curious and characteristic of the student that 
what he thinks of most is not immediate action, but the 
dismissal for ever of all the results of his contemplative 
life as a student, the bidding good-bye to contemplation — 

Kemember thee ! 
Ay, thou poor ghost, while memory holds a seat 
In this distracted globe. Eemember thee ! 
Yea, from the table of my memory 
I '11 wipe away all trivial fond records, 
All saws of books, all forms, all pressures past, 
That youth and observation copied there ; 
And thy commandment all alone shall live 
Within the book and volume of my brain, 
Unmix'd with baser matter : yes, by heaven ! 

He takes out his tablets to write his observation down. 
It seems an absurd action — but in reality it is a sub- 
conscious recurrence to a habit of his student life. At 
least, so I explain it. 

The others now rush in, filled with fear and curiosity. 
He receives them strangely, with wildered words of fan- 
tastic merriment. He seems to joke with them. When 
he hears the Ghost crying ' Swear ' underground, his wild 
mirth welcomes the dreadful voice — 

Ah, ha, boy ! say'st thou so ? art thou there, true-penny ? 
Come on : you hear this fellow in the cellarage : 

Well said, old mole ! canst work i' the earth so fast ? 
A worthy pioneer ! 

It was audacious of Shakespeare to represent this, but it is 
quite true to nature. When the strings of excitement are 
on the point of breaking, it is a relief to play madly with 
the cause of the excitement ; and the more appalling the 
cause, the greater is the relief playing with it affords. 
And that relief is still greater in a character like Hamlet's, 



106 LECTURES ON SHAKESPEARE 

to whose grave thoughtfulness of the inner life excite- 
ment was, till now, almost unknown. Even now the 
excitement is beginning to lessen. He is returning to 
his natural type. The rest of the scene is grave and 
quiet. He even muses for a moment on the strange 
event, turns it over, as if it were apart from himself, in 
thought. 

There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, 
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy. 

It might have been said over the fire at Wittenberg, if he 
had only read of such a story. Then he explains how he 
will act. He may bear himself ' strange and odd, and put 
j an antic disposition on.' He is going to pretend madness. 
But only fools like Polonius, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, 
and foolish girls like Ophelia, think him mad. Claudius, 
when he hears him talking wildly with Ophelia, under- 
stands that ' what he spake, though it lacked form a little, 
was not like madness.' Even Polonius, though he was 
convinced Hamlet was mad from love, says, ' though this 
be madness, yet there is method in %' — method, the one 
thing madness never has ! No ; what mad talk Hamlet 
has hereafter is his own clever imitation of it. Yet, it is 
a bad imitation. No sane man can imitate madness well. 
His sanity forces him to link thought to thought ; Hamlet 
always does that. No madman ever does — in the sphere 
of his madness. What he resolves on here, is resolved on 
partly to give him time, partly because he shrinks from 
violent action, partly because his doubts begin to beset 
him, and partly because his nature and his past life have 
caused him absolutely to abhor the position in which he 
is ^ placed, and unfitted him to meet it. Revenge is 
demanded from one who has only discussed revenge. 
The most resolute action is demanded from one who has 
always been up to this moment a doubter, a questioner, 
a natural sceptic. 



HAMLET 107 

The time is out of joint : cursed spite, 
That ever I was born to set it right ! 

When next we hear of him, he has been with Ophelia, 
and she describes his apparent madness to her father. 
Ophelia is the sensitive, impressionable, innocent, grace- 
ful, commonplace young girl, whom Hamlet, before he 
has seen the Ghost, has wooed and perhaps loved, finding, 
as I have said, a great pleasure, in the midst of the 
horrible life he now shares, in her innocent beauty and 
youth. She is never interesting, has little character, till 
love and sorrow make her mad. Her brother lectures 
her, her father lectures her. She replies with some 
sharpness to her brother, she obeys her father without 
a word. Her brother, Laertes, is the young man, just 
setting out into the world, whom Shakespeare has so 
often drawn, full of youth's sap, and eager for life ; fond 
of his sister, and jealous of her honour and his own ; 
obedient to his father, but scarcely listening to his advice — 
and with a certain worldly wisdom and insight into affairs 
of state, which lift him above the ordinary, and prepare 
us for the swift action he takes when the sister he loves 
is drowned of her pain, and the father he honours is slain 

— , 

by Hamlet. As to Polonius — he has, as he shows in his 
advice to his son, a wisdom gained from a long experience 
of life, or borrowed from the experience of others, cut and 
dried, bottled up for occasions, having no real ground in 
thought — the wisdom of the senile and cunning politician. 
In all else, he is a fool, and vain of the folly he believes to 
be wisdom. What thought he has, he cannot hold fast 
to ; it slips from his brain. He believes he is always right 
now, because he has been right when he was young. He 
leaps to conclusions, and the conclusions are to him 
unshakeable. He thinks he is fooling Hamlet, and does 
not even imagine he is being fooled. He pushes himself 
in everywhere, and settles all questions. His policy is to 



108 LECTURES ON SHAKESPEARE 

lurk behind curtains and overhear what is said, to send 
his man to Paris to spy out his son. The only time he 
shows real good sense is in his talk to Ophelia about 
Hamlet's wooing, and then he is too harsh to his daughter, 
too thoughtless of her feeling, too regardful of himself. 
Now, when he hears of Hamlet's antics by which Ophelia 
has been frightened, he explains, to his satisfaction, all 
the humours which the court has observed in Hamlet by 
saying that love in its ecstasy has made him mad — the 
very conclusion Hamlet intended him to make in order 
to conceal his dangerous effort to discover the truth about 
his father's murder. With many wanderings of aged 
vanity Polonius prevails on the King, whose conscience 
has made him fearful of Hamlet, to test this matter, to 
hide and listen while Hamlet and Ophelia talk together. 

Hamlet, who especially before Polonius plays the fool — 
folly lures the actor in him to caricature Polonius — 
sports with this tedious ass under the guise of madness. 

Pol. Do you know ine, my lord ? 

Ham. Excellent well ; you are a fishmonger. 

' Have you a daughter ? ' asks Hamlet, eager to encourage 
Polonius's view that he is mad from love ! Yet, he cannot 
help making his seeming madness talk good sense : ' Will 
you walk out of the air, my lord ? ' ' Into my grave ? ' 
asks Hamlet. And Polonius, suddenly puzzled by the 
sanity he feels in the phrase, answers — 

Indeed, that's out of the air. (Aside.) How pregnant sometimes his 
replies are ! a happiness that often madness hits on, which reason and 
sanity could not so prosperously be delivered of. 

fool, fool — no madman could have said it ! 

Finally Hamlet wearies of him, and of his own mad play 
with him — and all his sorrow rushes on him. 

■ I take my leave of you,' says Polonius — 

Ham. You cannot, sir, take from me anything that I will more 
willingly part withal : except my life, except my life, except my life. . . . 



HAMLET 109 

We hear in the words the terrible strain of his nerves — 
heightened by his being baited by a fool who wants he 
knows to find him out. 

There is no relief for him, however. Kosencrantz 
and Guildenstern are now set on him. He is on his 
guard all through this scene, tensely on guard. Yet they 
have been youthful friends of his — and he cannot quite 
believe that they are spies. Even when he drags out 
of them the fact that the King has sent for them to 
interview him, he seems to forget that treachery from 
time to time, and speaks to them as if they were really 
friends, especially when the entrance of the players 
relieves the strain. At the beginning of this interview 
Hamlet is all alert with suspicion, quite close to the 
present events and to his purpose of revenge. He mocks 
the two men. But as it goes on he slips away, again and 
again, into the contemplative region of his soul. The 
present glides away from his grasp, and he forgets it or 
only sees it as in a mist — 

There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so. 

This is another instance of that slipping away to his 
natural self. A still stronger one is this, where he slips 
out of the conversation into mystic thinking — 

God ! I could be bounded in a nutshell, and count myself king of 
infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams. 

They meet this — incapable of understanding it — with 

conventional talk about ambition ; for the King, whose 

messengers they are, suspects Hamlet of wishing for the 

crown. Hamlet sees this trick, and meets them with a 

direct question — 

Were you not sent for 1 

It is a sort of appeal to their friendship. Will you be true 
to me ? it seems to say. 

Come, deal justly with me : come, come ; nay, speak. 



110 LECTURES ON SHAKESPEARE 

They hesitate — he gives them up. And then he plays the 
half madman to them, confessing that he is changed 
within — 

I have of late — but wherefore I know not — lost all my mirth, forgone 
all my custom of exercises : and indeed it goes so heavily with my 
disposition that this goodly frame, the earth, seems to me a sterile pro- 
montory ; this most excellent canopy, the air, look you, this brave 
o'erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire, why, 
it appears no other tiling to me than a foul and pestilent congregation 
of vapours. 

It is quite true what he says ; it exactly expresses his 
situation ; but it is couched in so wild a poetry that the 
two men who are listening — and any mad-doctor who 
listened, wholly incapable of comprehending the imagina- 
tion in the phrases — would believe him to be mad, as 
Hamlet wished them (with infinite contempt of them) to 
believe. So far he is close to the point, and the present 
situation. But now, excited by his own words, thrilled 
within by his own imagination, he slips away again out 
of the outward world into the inward world of contempla- 
tion. The present vanishes away in abstract considera- 
tion of humanity — 

What a piece of work is a man ! How noble in reason ! how infinite in 
faculty ! in form and moving how express and admirable ! in action how 
like an angel ! in apprehension how like a god ! the beauty of the world ! 
the paragon of animals ! 

He might have said it — I repeat — at Wittenberg. 
Suddenly he is recalled to the present (perhaps by the 
amazement of these Philistines), and he comes home to 
what lies before him — 

And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust ? man delights not 
me ; no, nor woman neither, though by your smiling you seem to say so. 

The news of the coming of the Players relieves the tension 
of the scene, and Hamlet again, in his vital interest in 
play-acting, forgets the woeful situation in which he is — 
happy to forget it. At any moment he glides away from 



HAMLET 111 

his tragedy into the intellectual or metaphysical world. 
Everything he says about acting is of a high intelligence, 
of the sanest reasoning ; and he feels how too clear he has 
been, and cannot help saying to Guildenstern, 

I am but mad north-north- west : when the wind is southerly I know 
a hawk from a handsaw. 

Polonius comes in and irritates the sane man with his 
folly, so that, in Hamlet's wild humour — wild because, 
through the whole of this scene, underneath his passing 
forgetfulnesses, the terrible story of the Ghost is gnawing 
at his heart — he plays the madman with eagerness, with a 
kind of pleasure, before Polonius. Suddenly the Players 
enter; and as suddenly Hamlet forgets in this new interest 
all his trouble, enters fully into their business and into 
his own views of acting and of the drama, just as if he 
had never left Wittenberg. When they are dismissed, he 
gives them in charge to Polonius — ' Use them well/ 

Pol. My lord, I will use them according to their desert. 

Ham. God's bodikins, man, much better : use every man after his 
desert, and who shall 'scape whipping? Use them after your own 
honour and dignity : the less they deserve, the more merit is in your 
bounty. 

Perfect sanity is in every word. How Polonius could 
listen to it, and not know that Hamlet was as sane as 
Plato (whom, indeed, he would have thought quite mad), 
only shows what a veritable fool he was — one of the half 
idiots the world thinks wise men. 

When the Players are gone, Hamlet's thought recurs 
quickly to his father's murder, and he plots with the first 
Player to represent before the King the story the Ghost 
has told him. If the King blench at that, the story is 
true ; the doubts he has had are nought. Then he is left 
alone, and all the horror — partly dimmed by social converse 
— surges up again in his heart. We must understand that 
throughout the scenes he has lately passed through he 



112 LECTURES ON SHAKESPEARE 

has been kept at full tension; rigid to conceal what lies 
in his heart, forced to play a part of madness, worried by a 
fool, betrayed by his old friends, distressed by having let 
himself go and perhaps betrayed that he was acting, hold- 
ing all his little world at bay, angry with himself for delay, 
smitten to the heart by the passion of the actor for the 
woes of Hecuba, while he is moved to no effective passion. 
Conceive the fierce and silent strain of all this, and you 
will not wonder that when it is released, and the repressed 
passion let loose like a torrent, it takes the form of that 
wild, tumultuous soliloquy — close, close to his real self; 
unlike that other academic thing — ( To be or not to be.' 
0, what a rogue and peasant slave am I ! 

Doubt and questioning pervade it. Underneath it lies 
the deep debate in Hamlet's mind — partly caused, we must 
remember, by his passionate hatred of the situation and of 
the action it demands — as to whether the story he has 
heard was true. Was the King really guilty of this crime ? 
He tries to convince himself of that by furious abuse, 
by words which, assuming his uncle's guilt, will work him 
out of his doubt of it, and sting him into revenge — 

bloody, bawdy villain ! 
Kemorseless, treacherous, lecherous, kindless villain ! 
0, vengeance ! 

Then he despises himself for his big words — words, only 

words, when action seems demanded ; seems, for he is not 

sure — 

Why, what an ass am I ! This is most brave, 
That I, the son of a dear father murder'd, 
Prompted to my revenge by heaven and hell, 
Must, like a whore, unpack my heart with words, 
And fall a- cursing, like a very drab, 
A scullion ! 
Fie upon 't ! 

Yet his very self- contempt conducts him not into action, 
but into self- analysis — always gliding away from the hate- 



HAMLET 113 

fulness of the outward into his inward life — and then, in 
that inward life, finding only doubt, hesitation, wavering 
distress. Again he asks — Is the Ghost true? Is his 
vengeance justly asked for ? If I kill the King, will it 
be murder done on the guiltless, or justice done on the 
guilty ? I must prove the truth. The Players shall play 
that which will settle all my doubts. They shall represent 
before the King, as the Ghost told it him, his father's 
murder. Horatio, he says, 

Observe my uncle : if his occulted guilt 
Do not itself unkennel in one speech, 
It is a damned ghost that we have seen, 
And my imaginations are as foul 
As Vulcan's stithy. 

By this time the King is anxious. He does not believe 
in Hamlet's madness. His conscience sees discovery 
in conduct so strange and unaccountable as Hamlet's. 
Wherefore he falls in with Polonius's proposal to bring 
Hamlet and Ophelia together. Then, hiding behind the 
arras, he will know whether love for Ophelia or something 
more dangerous is at the bottom of this strangeness. 
Hamlet comes in and thinks himself alone ; and talks to 
himself in that famous soliloquy — 

To be, or not to be : that is the question. 

To listen to it is not to listen to a madman — and the 
King knows this, and is not deceived when Hamlet, 
detecting that he is spied on, changes his whole manner 
to Ophelia, and does play the madman — 

Love ! his affections do not that way tend ; 

Nor what he spake, though it lack'd form a little, 

"Was not like madness. There 's something in his soul 

O'er which his melancholy sits on brood, 4 , 

And I do doubt, the hatch and the disclose 

Will be some danger. 

The King, led by his fear, sees justly. That soliloquy 
— known over all the world — does not arise straight 

H 



114 LECTURES ON SHAKESPEARE 

out of the situation. It arises from a side issue of the 
situation, from Hamlet's loathing of life on account of the 
hateful and cursed events which darken his life. Is it 
right, is it advisable, is it foolish to put an end to life 
in sore trouble, or to fight out, and beat down, the 
trouble ? He argues it almost as if it were an abstract 
proposition, as he might have argued it with Horatio 
in his student days. He has slipped away again in 
thought from the present, save in so far that it is the 
present trouble that has raised the question. But once 
in the question, his meditative intellect and imagination 
move over it with an interest so keen that he forgets 
everything else. Point after point regarding life and 
death suggests itself, point after point is followed — he is 
far, far away in thought from Elsinore. • Suddenly he sees 
Ophelia ; softened by his dreaming, he is gentle with her. 
She speaks with tender grace, and returns his gifts. Sor- 
row has lifted her soul into a higher womanhood, love has 
deepened in her since we saw her last. At that moment 
he catches sight of Claudius and Polonius behind the 
arras ; and, furious with their spying, and disgusted with 
Ophelia who, he thinks, is their partner in deceit, he acts 
the rude, almost the savage madman — and, as he acts it, 
seems to take an artist's interest in the way he plays it, 
is kindled into fleeting passion by the sound of his own 
words — and doubles and trebles, as he goes on, his violence 
and rudeness. Even in this he runs away from reality. 

Of course, we may make another conjecture to account 
for his almost savage rudeness to the girl. He may really 
have been in love with Ophelia before the revelation of 
his father's murder and his mother's guilt had driven all 
thoughts of love away. If so, mingled up with his rage 
at the spying of the King and Polonius, would be the 
agony of love betrayed. Ophelia, he would think, had 
never loved him else had she never joined his enemies. 



HAMLET 115 

Her seeming love was not true. When a man is con- 
vinced of that, the ordinary courtesy and chivalry of a 
man to a woman is dissolved. He and she meet outside 
convention in the realm of truth alone, and passion 
speaks to passion face to face on equal terms. And the 
man will fling courtesies to the winds, and scorn and 
cursing and violence will shape the agony he suffers. 
So Othello speaks to Desdemona. So here Hamlet speaks 
to Ophelia. 

He leaves Ophelia in this storm, and poor Ophelia 
thinks his mind quite lost. Her pathetic cry over him, 
over herself, full of love, pity, and regret, prepare us for 
the madness which follows when the man she loves slays 
the father whom she respects. With what sadness, when 
she comes in playing with her flowers, we recall her pity 
now for Hamlet : 

Now see that noble and most sovereign reason, 
Like sweet bells jangled, out of tune and harsh ; 
That unmatch'd form and feature of blown youth 
Blasted with ecstasy : 0, woe is me, 
To have seen what I have seen, see what I see ! 

Then, in the midst of all these wildered scenes of tumbled 
thought and stormy feeling, of intellectual fantasy and 
doubt and fear, Shakespeare, who loves to fill his play 
with contrasts and variety, introduces in the scene with 
the Players, the commonsense, the clear criticism, the 
steady reasoning of Hamlet on the art of Acting. 1 

When the Players leave, Horatio comes in to Hamlet, 
and in the quiet sanity of their conversation we see how 
close their friendship is, how full of calm good sense. 
This talk is another proof that there was no real madness 
in Hamlet. Had he played his madman part alone, had 

1 When we read Hamlet's advice to the Players, we wish that all the 
critics of the Drama, and all the acting-managers, were (if he was mad, 
or half-mad) quite as mad as he. When also we read it, we understand 
what Shakespeare was as an acting-manager, we hear his personal ex- 
perience. 



116 LECTURES ON SHAKESPEARE 

he been without a confidant in his plot to catch the King 
— that would have been like a madman. But we now hear 
that he has told all the Ghost's story and his own to 
his one friend, consulted him throughout, made him a 
sharer of all his thoughts and plans ; and has done this 
on the sufficient ground of his long experience of Horatio's 
steadfast, unflattering character, and of his tried judgment. 
This is not madness, but wisdom — and it is plain that 
Horatio never thinks for a moment that Hamlet is not in 
his right mind. 

The play comes on. The King and Queen see their past 
on the stage. The Queen knows nothing of the murder. 
The King alone beholds his secret unveiled. It is excit- 
ing to follow. To see it on the stage thrills the recesses 
of the imagination. Hamlet's fierce excitement pervades 
the scene with its fury. It deepens as the play goes on, 
and as the King is more and more disturbed. His fierce 
interjected phrases grow in wild savagery. At last he 
interrupts the play, and himself tells the tale to the King 
— tumbling out his words, trembling with excitement — 

He poisons him i' the garden for his estate. His name 's Gonzago ; 
the story is extant, and written in very choice Italian : you shall see 
anon how the murderer gets the love of Gonzago's wife. 

Oph. The King rises. 

Ham. What ! frighted with false fire ! 

Queen. How fares my lord ? 

Pol. Give o'er the play. 

King. Give me some light. Away ! 

Pol. Lights, lights, lights ! 

And Hamlet is left alone with Horatio — wild with excite- 
ment, wild with the discovery of the truth — seeking (as 
it was after his scene with the Ghost) to drown the strain 
of his passion in wild merriment. He bursts into singing ; 
he falls exhausted into Horatio's arms ; he calls for music. 
He goes over the proof with Horatio — he cannot contain 
himself — and no wonder. It would have moved to excite- 



HAMLET 117 

ment a mountain of granite. This is the centre of the 
drama. 

Hamlet, after the King's discomfiture by the play, is 
borne beyond himself for the moment by his discovery 
that the Ghost's story was true. 

good Horatio, I '11. take the ghost's word for a thousand pounds. 
Didst perceive ? 

His excitement continues when Rosencrantz and Guilden- 
stern come in to summon him to the Queen. He knows 
he must conceal his secret from them, and he beats down 
his excitement. This inward struggle to appear calm 
when his soul and body are thrilling, is the cause of 
his broken phrases, of his mock courtesy, of his bitter but 
repressed scorn and hatred of the King, of that bitter but 
close-curbed wrath with the Queen, which are manifest 
in his talk with these spies of the King. He cannot 
help his scorn, but he can constrain his fury. It is a 
wonderful dialogue, and must be supremely difficult to 
act. At one point, however, he can let himself loose with- 
out endangering his secret. He can let those fellows know 
he looks on them as spies, and loathes them for that 
treachery. He offers one of them a pipe and bids him 
play upon it. ' I cannot/ he answers, ' I have not the 
skill/ And Hamlet answers half in contempt and half 
in rage. 

It is characteristic of him now that when he is excited 
by the closeness of events, his excitement is always on the 
edge of doubling and redoubling itself. The smouldering 
ash takes fire, and blazes to the skies. He does not betray 
the secret passions within, or their cause ; but he relieves 
their pressure by the furious words which he uses on 
matters other than his secret. And the words grow hotter 
and wilder as he speaks — as they do here. 



118 LECTURES ON SHAKESPEARE 

Why, look you now, how unworthy a thing you make of me ! You 
would play upon me ; you would seem to know my stops ; you would 
pluck out the heart of my mystery ; you would sound me from my 
lowest note to the top of my compass : and there is much music, excellent 
voice, in this little organ ; yet cannot you make it speak. 'Sblood, do 
you think I am easier to be played on than a pipe 1 Call me what in- 
strument you will, though you can fret me, yet you cannot play upon met 

But he can play on others. Polonius comes in, and he 
mocks him with feigned folly ; his wild excitement runs 
into a bitter merriment — he makes himself foolish to a 
fool. 

Ham. Do you see yonder cloud that 's almost in shape of a camel ? 

Pol. By the mass, and 'tis like a camel, indeed. 

Ham. Methinks it is like a weasel. 

Pol. It is backed like a weasel. 

Ham. Or like a whale ? 

Pol. Very like a whale. 

Ham. Then I will come to my mother by and by. (Aside.) They 
fool me to the top of my bent. 

And now he is left alone again, and night has fallen. All 
his repressed fury breaks out of him. His words are the 
words of a swashbuckler — 

Now could I drink hot blood, 
And do such bitter business as the day 
Would quake to look on. 

He is thinking of the King ; but his whole nature hates 
the bloody work he is called to do. To every fibre of the 
being of this imaginative student it is repugnant. It is 
the lashing of his nature up to do what he hates which is 
the reason and the excuse for his turgid phrases. The 
next moment he thinks of his mother, and his violent 
speech becomes pitiful with his thought. ' heart ! ' he 
cries, ' lose not thy nature.' ' I will speak daggers to her, 
but use none.' The storm within is beginning to lose its 
fury. It has been almost spent in that volcanic outburst. 
His passion lowers its crest, and his habit of thinking 
over the problem of the situation instead of meeting it by 



HAMLET 119 

action, has now begun to resume its normal sway. But 
then, as he goes to the Queen, he sees the King alone, and 
praying. The full opportunity has come, but he is no 
longer in the full exaltation which would lead him to 
make use of it. 

Now might I do it pat, now he is praying ; 

But he does not do it. On the contrary, his exaltation 
is so lessened that now he argues the matter. If I kill 
him now, he goes to heaven. Is that revenge ? 1 11 wait 
till I can catch him in mortal sin, and so send him to 
damnation. 

It is plain the fury has died down, else he would not 
discuss the killing. It is plain that behind the ruthless 
argument there is the dislike to kill, now that his blood 
is colder. Hamlet, unless driven by a passionate impulse, 
will not act ; but when he is quick with momentary 
passion, he acts instantly, as when he sacrifices Guilden- 
stern and Bosencrantz, when he leaps into Ophelia's 
grave, when he kills the King, even when he kills 
Polonius. In a moment he springs into destroying act ; 
in the next moment he falls back into his customary 
meditation — now a very quiet, now a most dangerous man. 

He has now come to see his mother. His mood is 
grave, not furious; he does not suspect her of any 
knowledge of his father's murder. He is only indignant 
with her marriage with the murderer. And he is softened 
by the natural piety of a son. Yet below there is in his 
soul the ground swell of the dark situation into which 
he has been thrust against his will. In this atmosphere 
of many thoughts compact, he is liable to change, at any 
moment, from one mood into another, from one man into 
another, as he does in this interview. Moreover, he is 
also liable, at a touch, to wander away from the actual 
present into the imaginative world of thought in which 



120 LECTURES ON SHAKESPEARE 

he naturally lives. In such a medley in his soul he is 
outside of this world and its seeming realities. Life and 
death, love and sorrow, even his own pain are as dreams, 
are nothing. Hence Polonius's death is no more than an 
incident, his slaughter of him no matter. At first he is 
rough and rude with the Queen. He pushes her down 
into her chair. The Queen thinks she is dealing with a 
madman and cries for help. Polonius cries behind the 
arras. Hamlet whips out his sword. All in a moment 
action seizes on him — he leaps out of one world into 
another. It is his way. He lunges through the curtain. 
1 me, what hast thou done ? ' cries the Queen. ' Nay/ 
answers Hamlet, ' I know not : is it the King ? ' I am 
told that when Edmund Kean said that awful word, the 
whole theatre rose in wild appreciation. I would I had 
been there. But Hamlet has no care for what he has 
done. He leaves the body, and turns, forgetting it, to 
his mother. Nothing can show more clearly than this 
the carelessness, the overmastering tyranny of thought, 
the grip upon him of the mystery of evil in which he is 
entangled. He flings one word of pity to the old man, 
and ends with a sarcasm — 

Thou wretched, rash, intruding fool, farewell ! 
I took thee for thy better : take thy fortune ; 
Thou find'st to be too busy is some danger. 

'Tis a light epitaph for a murdered man ! Once the thing 
is done, Hamlet thinks no more of it. No remedy for it, 
it is ended — a mere incident in comparison with the over- 
whelming horror in which he is involved. And he turns, 
as if he had done nothing, to his mother, to tent her to 
the quick. 

It is a strange scene. There is a certain staginess in 
the business of the two portraits which is like what a 
young man, who does not know the world, might fall into. 



HAMLET 121 

I do not think it effective, even as art, on the stage. It 
enables Hamlet, however, to dramatise the occasion, and 
this dramatisation already shows that he has begun to 
slip away a little from the stern reality into an imagina- 
tive picture of it. And as his imagination takes fire, his 
moral indignation takes fire also, and he glides on — so 
curiously — away from the pressing present into a half- 
philosophic contrast between the lust of youth and of a 
matron, and then into a blaze of raging words (to relieve 
his soul) against the King, such words as he has used 
before without shaping them into deeds — lapsing out of 
resolution into soliloquy — into an intellectual passion 
which, content with itself, does not drive the will to 
act. His father's spirit knows his temper, and enters 
suddenly. Terror comes with the ghostly presence, terror 
that merges into love, 

Save me, and hover o'er me with your wings, 

You heavenly guards ! What would your gracious figure ? 

And in the vision Hamlet knows and describes himself: 

Ham. Do you not come your tardy son to chide, 
That, lapsed in time and passion, lets go by 
The important acting of your dread command ? 
0, say ! 

Ghost. Do not forget : this visitation 

Is but to whet thy almost blunted purpose. 

That is Shakespeare's own description of Hamlet's state 
of mind. Every explanation of Hamlet's nature must 
take it as a test. And Shakespeare takes care to clear 
Hamlet of madness — indeed, of any wild ecstasy that 
might, for the moment, run into madness. 

My pulse, as yours, doth temperately keep time, 
And makes as healthful music : it is not madness 
That I have utter 5 d : bring me to the test, 
And I the matter will re-word, which madness 
Would gambol from. 



122 LECTURES ON SHAKESPEARE 

And his speech now is quiet and to the point. But again, 
it slips away into disquisition. That ineradicable habit of 
his — to moralise, to philosophise, as if he were in his rooms 
at Wittenberg — again seizes him. Again, he forgets, 
momentarily, the matter in hand, and preaches about habit, 
and the breaking of habits ; again, he repeats his bitter cry 
against his mother living with the King ; then runs into a 
scorn of a woman's loose tongue — with a menace in it — and 
ends with a fierce threat of what he will do with those 
treacherous schoolfellows whose craft he will outcraft ; and 
with a bitter mock which is half of sorrow for Polonius. 

A multitude of motives ! His soul is a tossing sea 
and every wave a thought. One thought undulates after 
another — thoughts of philosophy drawn from his student 
life, of misery at its breaking up, of horror and hatred of 
his mother's incest, his father's murder, of the breaking 
of his love, of the feigning of madness, of the King's self- 
betrayal, of his father's supernatural appearance, of his 
own delay in revenging him. They come and go; he 
slips from one to another. He cannot hold any one of 
them enough to shape it into present act. 

Is this the man who could fulfil a revenge ? But, all 
the same, having once dipped his hand in blood, having 
passed the Rubicon which he thought never to have 
passed, a new and unknown element is added to his life ; 
he no longer shrinks from giving death to his foes. A 
new element, brought by some chance into life — who that 
has ever known what that experience is, can tell what 
changes it will work within ; what it will force us to do 
in the world without ? With this within him, Hamlet is 
now a danger to his foes. In slaying Polonius, he has at 
last overstepped the bounds which held him back from 
blood. He will not be squeamish again, and he proves 
that soon by handing over Rosencrantz and Guildenstern 
to death. 



HAMLET 123 

I cannot quite get over that affair. I believe there are 
critics who, desirous, in contradiction to Shakespeare, to 
prove that Hamlet was prompt and resolute in action, folk 
who seem to imagine that Hamlet was a real character, 
and not made by Shakespeare, aver that when he rewrote 
the letter, and sent Rosencrantz and Guild enstern to death, 
and himself escaped on board the pirate, he showed quick 
resolve passing into immediate action. But he had meant 
all along to hoist these engineers with their own petard, 
if he proved them traitors. 

It is also said he proved by this his intellectual sharp- 
ness, his clear brain; proved that he was a man not of 
impulsive but of calculating action. I only see in it the 
cunning almost of a madman. That action of his — an 
action of treachery and of mean treachery — is so apart 
from the rest of his magnanimous character, that, if ever 
Hamlet passed the limit between feigned and real mad- 
ness, he seems to me to have passed it then. The punish- 
ment he inflicted on Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was 
far too heavy for their guilt — the sort of punishment 
which just reasoning would not have imposed. The event 
does not prove Hamlet's clearness of intellect, but on the 
contrary. At no other point of the play does he act in 
this unintelligent, unmoral way. It is said in excuse of 
Hamlet's conduct here, that the age in which he lived 
was savage, and human life of no importance. That is 
true ; but Hamlet, as Shakespeare made him, was not of 
that age. He is not naturally fond of blood or war, of 
drink or feasting, of such treachery, for ambition's sake, 
as the King's. He does not belong to this crew; nay, 
it was part of Shakespeare's idea to place in the closest 
contact with them this young man who differed at every 
point from them, to whom they were naturally repug- 
nant, and to work out his drama within that outline. 
This action of Hamlet's with Rosencrantz and Guilden- 



124 LECTURES ON SHAKESPEARE 

stern is not in harmony with Shakespeare's conception, 
nor with the rest of his drawing of Hamlet. 1 I am told 
uli<*b there are those who call it heroic, in a vain endeavour 
to make a hero out of Hamlet. I hope a hero is built 
on other lines. It is still more absurd, as I believe some 
American has done, to make him heroic because he 
leaps into Ophelia's grave in rivalry of Laertes' sorrow, 
or because he kills the King, when not to kill him were 
ridiculous. I do not care where Shakespeare got this 
episode ; it is a blot on the play. 

In the King, on the contrary, we have drawn one to 
whom for the sake of lust and ambition treachery was 
native. He does not act by open murder, but by furtive 
stealth; bloody, but not bold or resolute. He hangs 
behind curtains to spy out those he fears. As his fears 
increase, his treachery deepens. He makes Hamlet bear 
letters to England which carry Hamlet's death-warrant. 
He makes a vile plot to do away with Hamlet by Laertes. 
He draws that young fellow into dishonour, guarding 
himself from blame or danger. He approves Laertes' 
suggestion of oiling the rapier's point with poison. He 
plans, to make all sure, a poisoned cup for Hamlet, should 
Laertes fail — a secret, traitorous villain. All his talk is 
of a bluffing honesty. He is a half-Iago; he plays the 
part of a bold, open-hearted King. It is the scented 
grease of the traitor which smoothes his words. With 
his treachery is mingled, in equal parts, sensuality. He 
drinks deep, and feasts high. He has seduced the Queen 
while her husband is alive. He marries her within a 
month. It is to his credit that he loves her, and not 
only her body — 



1 Moreover, it is a mistake in art to link Hamlet up with the King in 
a treacherous and murderous action. He is for the moment hand in 
hand with the King ; and Shakespeare should not have done this. 
Moreover the act is not in Hamlet's character. 



HAMLET 125 

She 's so conjunctive to my life and soul, 
That, as the star moves not but in his sphere, 
I could not but by her. 

Let that be recorded on his side of the account. Shake- 
speare did not mean to make him altogether bad. His 
first speech is statesmanlike ; the foreign affairs of Denmark 
are safe in his hands. This also is to his credit. But his 
claim to be thought a father to Hamlet, his long preach- 
ment to Hamlet against overweening grief, delivered on 
a high moral, even a religious note is — since he has 
murdered the father of the man whose grief he blames — 
a piece of detestable and unforgivable hypocrisy. 

In such a treacherous soul Fear is a common in- 
habitant; and fear, as it grows, doubles the action of 
treachery. Nothing is too bad to do in order to keep 
past guilt still concealed; and whatever is done at the 
bidding of this fear, is done with exhaustive treachery, 
as, for example, the doubling of the poison to slay Hamlet 
by the hand of Laertes — Laertes whom the King would 
also have slain the next day, for the traitor never spares 
the accomplice in his treachery. Again, fear is clear- 
sighted. The King, and only the King, suspects Hamlet's 
transformation as having danger to him behind it. All 
the rest are deceived by Hamlet; the King is not. He 
sets Rosencrantz and Guildenstern on Hamlet to find out 
1 whether aught unknown to us afflicts him thus.' When 
Hamlet plays the madman with Ophelia, the King sus- 
pects more deeply. When the Mouse-trap is played 
before him, he knows. Fear then drinks up his heart; 
and fear awakens his drugged conscience into idiotic 
speech. The King's conscience, for Shakespeare does 
not leave him without a semblance of it, totters about, 
uttering confused contradictions, and falls back again 
into its drugged slumber. It seems to have been already 
touched by Polonius's phrase — 



126 LECTURES ON SHAKESPEARE 

Pol. That with devotion's visage 

And pious action we do sugar o'er 

The Devil himself. 
King. 0, 'tis too true ! 

How smart a lash that speech doth give my conscience ! 

What sort of a conscience it was we hear in his soliloquy 
when (after the terror of his discovery) he tries to pray. 
Shakespeare opens the secret chamber of his soul. He 
confesses himself to himself, his murder, his inability to 
pray. But there is forgiveness in heaven, he says, else 
what were the use of the existence of mercy ; and to pray 
is to be pardoned. So will my fault be gone. But then, 
I keep all the pleasant results of my crime, and I doubt 
that one can be pardoned and retain the offence. That is 
often the way with earthly law, but not with heavenly — 

There is no shuffling, there the action lies 
In his true nature, and we ourselves compell'd 
Even to the teeth and forehead of our faults 
To give in evidence. 

What then ; I '11 try repentance, but I cannot. c wretched 
state ! Help ! angels ! make assay ! ' change me, force me 
to be good. ' All may be well.' He prays, but his heart 
and its fear keep his thoughts to earth. He cannot get 
away from his dread of discovery. 

My words fly up, my thoughts remain below : 
Words without thoughts never to heaven go. 

All the same, it has been a great relief to him to have had 
it out with his conscience, to have listened to its wail and 
bid it go to sleep ; to have confessed in speech his crime ; 
to have bluffed heaven with a desire for repentance. 
When we have not a priest to open our sins to, and get 
rid of them by speech ot them, we make ourselves priest 
as well as penitent, and gain a great relief, even a renewed 
power of sinning again. Or, perhaps, it is that the self- 
deceit we then practise is so vile that it makes the whole 
character much viler; and then, in the added vileness, 



HAMLET 127 

worse sins than we did before are easier henceforth, and 
are done with even a certain gusto. The King is certainly, 
in his murderous treachery to Hamlet and Laertes, twice 
as bad as he was before his prayers. He has earned a 
greater damnation. 

The fourth Act is very long-winded — so many threads 
have to be gathered up and woven together, in order to 
get home to the conclusion. It might have been made 
shorter and more effective had Shakespeare managed it 
better. It contains the episode of sending Hamlet to 
England, of the treachery of Hamlet to Rosencrantz and 
Guildenstern, of the awkward pirate story, which has 
made the play linger and crawl, and forced on the writer 
a number of needless explanations in needless scenes. 
Hamlet could have been got rid of for a time in some 
other fashion which would not have exacted so much 
delay. It is true, the play was never intended to move 
swiftly, like Macbeth, or to be knit closely together in 
almost a unity of place and time, like Othello. Shake- 
speare, who loved variety, meant it to linger, and the 
nature and character of Hamlet, as he conceived them, 
could only be developed slowly. Hamlet himself is a 
lingerer. His presence alone detains events. His inces- 
sant thinking forces the other characters to move slowly. 
Yet, the delay is too great. The Queen, the King, even 
Laertes, seem in their conversation to be infected with 
Hamlet's over-thinking and under-action in this fourth 
Act. I can fancy even an Elizabethan audience crying 
to the dramatist — * Get on, get on ! ' 

The introduction in this Act of the army of Fortinbras 
meeting Hamlet on his way to the sea, if it be necessary 
to account for his appearance at the close of the play, 
need not ake up so much time. It certainly motives 
another soliloquy of Hamlet's by which we understand 
that he is as far away as ever from taking any action for 



128 LECTURES ON SHAKESPEARE 

his revenge. So far as the Drama is concerned, this new 
soliloquy only repeats, in the main, the two former ones. 
It is a wail over his delay. This army, led by an eager 
prince, runs quick to his ambitious goal, and the thought 
of it ' spurs his dull revenge ' — and then he glides away 
to ask, What is a man if he only lives to sleep and eat ? 

Sure, he that made us with such large discourse, 
Looking before and after, gave us not 
That capability and godlike reason 
To fust in us unused. 

And he applies this to his delay. ' Oblivion ' — a curious 
reason, but a true one — or ' A craven scruple ' — also true 
— or ' Thinking too precisely on the event ' — the truest 
reason — have held back his hand. But while he is thus 
on the point, seeing himself clearly — he slips away, as 
before, on thoughts about greatness and fame suggested 
by his own words, and then comes back again to his own 
problem — but only to thinking of it — waves of thought 
running after one another without clear direction — 

0, from this time forth, 
My thoughts be bloody, or be nothing worth ! 

Dramatically, all this is quite unnecessary. But, as fine 
thinking on Shakespeare's part, and as fine poetry, it is 
excellent. I cannot help thinking that this episode and 
soliloquy were never intended to be acted, but were inserted 
by Shakespeare, in his revision of the play, in order to add 
some father metaphysical thoughts to his delineation of 
Hamlet. And I believe that this is also true of other 
places in the play. 

Whatever we may say about the rest of the Act, it is 
made beautiful by the pity of Ophelia's fate. Never did 
madness take a more delicate, a more gracious shape. 
Pretty Ophelia, cries the King. Thought and affliction, 
says her brother, passion, hell itself, 

She turns to favour and to prettiness. 



HAMLET 129 

Her littleness, her commonplace is gone. She is in the 
invisible, the supersensible world, among the spirits be- 
yond the earth ; a child now of the gods ; no fear in her 
heart, only a vague sorrow; of an infinite kindness to 
the world; in love with the beauty of flowers, closer to 
them in thought than to anything else ; a child within a 
maiden; touching with frankness that which a sane 
maiden might think or dream, but would conceal ; singing 
through life, for she loves sweet sound ; gay with a pitiful 
gaiety; slipping without any link of thought from one fancy 
to another ; — all the deep fineness of her loving nature, now 
unladen of convention, visible on the surface of her girl- 
hood. Were it not so beautiful, it were too piercing in 
its pathos. Were it not so pitiful, it were not so beautiful. 
Hamlet, speaking to the Queen, describes what madness 
is, and admirably; a thing a madman could not do. 
Ophelia is mad ; and whence Shakespeare drew the power 
to represent it in its gentlest form, yet in its completeness, 
and so as to wake pity, not repulsion, the philosophers may 
try to discover ; I will not. But he does not only repre- 
sent it in her ; he states by the mouth of the Gentleman 
of what sort it is. 

She speaks much of her father, says she hears 

There 's tricks i' the world ; and hems and beats her heart ; 

Spurns enviously at straws ; speaks things in doubt, 

That carry but half sense : her speech is nothing, 

Yet the unshaped use of it doth move 

The hearers to collection ; they aim at it, 

And botch the words up fit to their own thoughts ; 

Which, as her winks and nods and gestures yield them, 

Indeed would make one think there might be thought, 

Though nothing sure, yet much unhappily. 

That is an admirable sketch, and especially the picture of 
those people who, listening to insane wanderings, try to 
fit them into sanity, or to find out the origin of the broken 
images the madman uses. They fail, for what we hear 

i 



130 LECTURES ON SHAKESPEARE 

said is generally only half a thought — the first half of it, 
or the latter half of it — and this because any thought, 
when it is not seized and retained by the will, is succeeded 
by another with extraordinary rapidity. Each matter 
then runs into the brain and runs instantly out of it, and 
another takes its place before it is finished. Ophelia's 
speech bears the same relation to sane speech that the 
pieces of a broken jar bear to the unbroken jar. One 
thing is, however, dominant — her father's death ; and it is 
dominant because it was that which broke up order in her 
brain ; done as it was by her lover. Of her lover she says 
nothing, but that he also underlies her pain is marked by 
her songs about St. Valentine, and the strange slips, so 
common in delirium, into a certain grossness, which is 
primeval nature speaking, when the restraint of con- 
vention is removed. It is so plainly innocent that it does 
not injure the beauty of her delicate sorrow, her piteous 
gaiety. Oh, how mingled of many drifts of pain and 
pleasure, of memories remembered to be forgotten, of 
forgetfulness intruded on by memory — and all broken, all 
astray — is her speech ! Here is one instance — 

I'hope all will be well. We must be patient : but I cannot choose 
but weep, to think they should lay him i' the cold ground. My brother 
shall know of it : and so I thank you for your good counsel. Come, my 
coach ! Good night, ladies ; good night, sweet ladies ; good night, good 
night. 

And her gracious, graceful play with the flowers — was any- 
thing more beautiful ever written ? She dies with flowers, 
in a stream banked in with flowers, and singing snatches 
of sweet song. In loveliness she died ; and the world went 
on, the better for her madness, since it was beautiful. She 
came, in her innocent grace, in her feeble maidenhood, into 
the path of great events, when they were clashing in 
storm, and she perished in the wind of them. Hamlet 
says of the death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern — 



HAMLET 131 

'Tis dangerous when the baser nature comes 
Between the pass and fell incensed points 
Of mighty opposites. 

It is as dangerous for an ignorant sweet maid to be 
innocently involved in the beating together of such 
opponents as the King and Hamlet. She, like the others, 
like Polonius, Laertes, Guildenstern, Kosencrantz, the 
Queen, meets the fate of the crystals between the pestle 
and the mortar. The innocent perish like the guilty ; 'tis 
a strange world. Yet Ophelia lives on — it is her reward — 
in the high region where the generations of men find that 
happiness in contemplation of beauty which after no 
repenting draws. The others we do not care to think of; 
they are not our inspiration. But Ophelia remains, with 
Hamlet, in the hearts of men. There are none who have 
not heard her say to us, in secret hours — 

There 's rosemary, that J s for remembrance ; pray you, love, remember : 
and there is pansies, that 's for thoughts. 

It is characteristic of Shakespeare to knit up the humour 
of his play with her death in order to preserve the con- 
tinuance of thought and the unity of action. The fifth Act 
begins with the humorous talk of the two grave-diggers 
who are delving Ophelia's grave, and who discuss whether 
she ought, or ought not, to have Christian burial. What 
to them is all this misery ? what matter Kings and Queens, 
murders and adulteries to them ? Shakespeare has made 
their apartness from the terror and pity of the circum- 
stance around them almost shocking ; yet this apartness 
of theirs seems to enhance the tragic elements. 

Then, too, the gulf between the upper and under classes 
— that gulf which makes the tragedy of states — was never 
made more clear than he has done in this scene. The 
death which the rich see with terror, which the King fears 
so much that he will do murder to rid him of its fear, is 
nothing to these men but a matter of rough humour. They 



132 LECTURES ON SHAKESPEARE 

joke and sing as they dig graves. They hare a pride in 
their business ; the houses they make last till doomsday. 
Has this fellow, says Hamlet, with the sensitive feeling of 
his class, no feeling of his business that he sings at grave- 
making? And again (still feeling what his class feels), 
he answers Horatio, who has said that custom has made it 
easy for the clown to sing amid graves — 

"lis e'en so : the hand of little employment hath the daintier sense, 

— the idle man of our class has time for fine feeling. It is 
now, in this half-philosophic mood, that we meet Hamlet 
again by the grave of Ophelia. He does not know of her 
death. He is quite grave and interested in the church- 
yard and the thoughts it engenders. Shakespeare has felt 
that if the joking of the grave-diggers went on much 
longer, without the introduction of a serious element, the 
tragic atmosphere would be injured. Therefore the con- 
versation of Hamlet and Horatio turns to the seriousness 
which befits gentlehood when it finds itself among the 
dead. The light song of the sexton accompanies the grave 
reflections of the thinker, and sets them into clear relief. 

Nothing in the play is stranger than Hamlet's apartness 
through this scene from the trouble in which he is 
involved. Even when his father and himself are spoken 
of by the grave-digger, this does not seem to awaken him 
out of philosophising into the reality of things. His 
voyage seems to have wiped away his agony. Here, with 
his friend, he meditates aloud on what he sees, just as he 
might have done when he was a student. His revenge 
is replaced by contemplative thought. Who were these 
dead, and what are they now ? a politician, a courtier, a 
lawyer? and now their skulls arejowled on the ground, 
knocked about the mazzard with a sexton's spade — 

Here 's fine revolution, an' we had the trick to see 't. 

It is curiously tragic to hear him wander away into an 



HAMLET 133 

imagination of the eager life of the men whose skulls lie 
at his feet, and to know, as one listens, that round the 
corner waits his father's demand for vengeance. It is still 
more curious to be sure from his meditative talk that for 
the moment he has forgotten all about it. One little 
remark, following on the cool indifference to him of the 
grave-digger, shows how, in continuous thought, he has 
followed in the past what we call ' the tendencies of the 
age.' 

How absolute the knave is ! we must speak by the card, or equivocation 
will undo us. By the Lord, Horatio, this three years I have taken note 
of it ; the age is grown so picked that the toe of the peasant comes so 
near the heel of the courtier, he galls his kibe. 

But the main thought of his meditative hour is persistent, 
and the famous address to Yorick's skull best enshrines 
his customary musing on life and death — their contrast 
and their interchange — which his late experience has 
intensified. 

Alas, poor Yorick ! I knew him, Horatio : a fellow of infinite jest, of 
most excellent fancy : he hath borne me on his back a thousand times ; 
and now, how abhorred in my imagination it is ; my gorge rises at it. 
Here hung those lips that I have kissed I know not how oft. Where 
be your gibes now, your gambols, your songs, your flashes of merriment, 
that were wont to set the table on a roar ? Not one now, to mock your 
own grinning ; quite chop-fallen ? 

Shakespeare's heart must have been bitter with pain to 
have written that, and bitterer still when, wrenched with 
curious cynicism mixed with indignation, he finished it 
with a savage touch — 

Now get you to my lady's chamber, and tell her, let her paint an 
inch thick, to this favour she must come ; make her laugh at that. 

Hamlet wanders on, multiplying thoughts, in his fashion, 
round his main thought, varying it, illustrating it, absorbed 
in meditation — when suddenly — all the actual world 
rushes on him with King, Queen, the procession following 
the corpse of Ophelia, and Laertes wild with sorrow. 



134 LECTURES ON SHAKESPEARE 

What will Hamlet do now ? He will do what he has done 
before, when the agony of the present is suddenly rushed 
upon him. Quiet for a little, there will follow an out- 
burst of unbridled passion, expressing itself in wild and 
wilder words. This is what takes place when Hamlet 
hears the furious sorrow of Laertes, as he leaps into 
Ophelia's grave. He says so himself. 'For sure, the 
bravery of his grief did put me into a towering passion 
— I am very sorry that I forgot myself.' It was not the 
bravery of Laertes' grief which made the storm. It was 
that he had forgotten, and suddenly remembered all. 

Laertes has also been excited by events. He has 
headed a revolution. He has been lured into a plot to 
slay Hamlet. His father's death, his sister's death, he 
attributes to Hamlet. A tempest roars within him : and 
in those days, when men were not reserved, they drove the 
inward tempest into high-swelling words and acts. Both, 
as here given, seem unnatural to us. Laertes is painfully 
rhetorical. He leaps into the grave x — 

Now pile your dust upon the quick and dead, 
Till of this flat a mountain you have made 
To o'ertop old Pelion, or the skyish head 
Of blue Olympus. 

Hamlet hears, and his ancient love simmering in his heart, 
rushes into a like excitement, and leaps also into the grave : 

Ham. What is he whose grief 

Bears such an emphasis 1 whose phrase of sorrow 
Conjures the wandering stars and makes them stand 
Like wonder- wounded hearers ? This is I, 
Hamlet the Dane. 

Laer. The devil take thy soul ! 

They struggle, and the physical rage of the struggle 
doubles Hamlet's mental excitement, which, as it doubles, 

1 Quite a little disquisition might be written about the conduct of Laertes, 
and why Shakespeare is so very rhetorical in Hamlet. But it is scarcely 
worth while. 



HAMLET 135 

annihilates by its supremacy the lesser passion of Laertes, 

the lesser man. 

I loved Ophelia : forty thousand brothers 
Could not, with all their quantity of love, 
Make up the sum. 

Once started, his passion mounts and mounts, climbing 

the sky, till, having reached a wildness of imagination, 

in which he outsoars Laertes' image, 

And, if thou prate of mountains, let them throw 
Millions of acres on us, till our ground, 
Singeing his pate against the burning zone, 
Make Ossa like a wart ! 

it falls as suddenly. He realises his loss of himself — 

Nay, an thou 'It mouth, 
I '11 rant as well as thou. 

It is very characteristic. If outbreaks of this kind, 
or liability to them constitute madness, Hamlet was 
mad at these times. If such outbreaks do become con- 
tinuous and frequent, sanity is in danger. But hosts of 
men and women are subject to them, and recover from 
them, as Hamlet did, with a certain shame. ' I have lost 
myself,' they say. We cannot call them insane; they 
still retain the grip over their will ; they recover them- 
selves; they are under no illusion. The transient fury 
is conquered, and, for the most part of life, they are, 
like Hamlet, quiet enough. But if, like Hamlet, who was 
naturally a still and pensive person, they are subjected, as 
he was, to the continual surging within of a secret tempest 
of battling thought round a repugnant and hateful subject, 
then any exciting cause, coming from without, flings them 
into gusts of passion, makes them forget themselves ; and 
this is even a relief to them. It enables them (in a sphere 
of thought not connected with their secret trouble) to 
relieve its pressure, to blow off its steam ; and, in doing 
so, they avoid the betrayal of their secret. 

It was so here with Hamlet at Ophelia's grave. When 



136 LECTURES ON SHAKESPEARE 

we find him again, he confesses that he lost his head. He 
talks quietly with Horatio, telling him how he dispersed 
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern — and full of wise remarks — 

Our indiscretion sometimes serves us well 
When our deep plots do pall ; and that should learn us 
There 's a divinity that shapes our ends, 
Bough-hew them how we will. 

Finally, as he tells of the treachery of the King, his long- 
protracted revenge, of which we have lost sight of late, 
recurs again — but still with a questioning of conscience 
in it, or with an allusion to a previous questioning of 

conscience, 

Is 't not perfect conscience, 
To quit him with this arm ? and is 't not to be damn'd, 
To let this canker of our nature come 
In further evil 1 

So Shakespeare, recovering the main motive of the play, 
prepares us for the last scene. But Hamlet, before half 
an hour has passed by, Hamlet, the creature of moods, 
the victim of the moment, seems again to forget all about 
his slaying of the King, in appraising, playing with, and 
mocking Osric, who brings him Laertes' challenge to a 
bout with the foils. 

Osric is the dandy, the decadent euphuist, the rich 
hanger-on of the court, the water-fly. Hamlet sketches 
him, almost as a socialist would do — 

He hath much land, and fertile ; let a beast be lord of beasts, and his 
crib shall stand at the king's mess : 'tis a chough, but, as I say, spacious 
in the possession of dirt. 

He mocks his subservience as he mocked Polonius ; he 
imitates, with confounding cleverness, Osric's plumed 
speech, his dainty phrases ; and he finishes by a medita- 
tion on the whole of Osric's tribe, who represent one 
tendency of the time. He is again miles away from his 
revenge. It comes in the end, all of a sudden, as it were 
by chance: quite unpremeditated at the moment, as if 



HAMLET 137 

the gods, and not he, had slain the King. In a rush of 
dying fury, he does that slaughter of the King over which 
he has thought and questioned and doubted for so long a 
time, which he has forgotten and remembered so often, 
from which he has receded so far, and to which he has 
approached so nearly; does it almost without knowing 
what he does, with no satisfaction in his revenge. And 
he drags down with himself, and with the King, owing to 
his delays, the Queen, Polonius, Ophelia, and Laertes. 

There were from the beginning only two things to do — 
and to do at once — either to obey the Ghost, and kill the 
King quickly, and take the consequence — or else to say 
the Ghost was wrong in urging vengeance ; and to disobey 
him, leaving to the justice of God the punishment of the 
King. Hamlet did neither. And it is plain, as Shake- 
speare conceived him, that he could do neither the one 
nor the other. He acted, or did not act, within his 
character — acted, or did not act, inevitably. 

Dying, he felt this ; and felt he might be mistaken by 
the world. I have been fantastic, he thought, and the 
world does not understand the fantastic in one born to 
great position. I have been drawn from a quiet life into 
a tangled web of stormy events and hateful crimes, and 
the world does not understand the story, and how a 
Prince of my character was not made to ride the storm 
or to endure the horror of the crimes. Therefore live, 
Horatio, to tell the truth and explain me to the people. 

good Horatio, what a wounded name, 

Things standing thus unknown, shall live behind me ! 

If thou didst ever hold me in thy heart, 

Absent thee from felicity a while, 

And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain, 

To tell my story. 

Fortinbras : he has my dying voice ; 
So tell him, with the occurrents, more and less, 
Which have solicited. The rest is silence. 



138 LECTURES ON SHAKESPEARE 

So cracked a noble heart, thinking with his last breath of 
the peace of his country, himself at last at peace. 

He has drifted through the play till the hour when the 
infinite happiness of death removed him from himself, 
and from a world where he had done all that his nature 
could have done. 



V 
MEASURE FOR MEASURE 

The date at which Measure for Measure was written is 
uncertain. But there are some passages in the play 
which are supposed, on very little evidence, to refer to the 
conduct of James I. and to his character, at the time of 
and after his entry into London. The Duke is at certain 
places credited with a likeness to James (Act i. sc. 2, 68). 
Also, the fantastical spying of the Duke resembles the spy- 
fever in which James found a chuckling pleasure, and 
which Walter Scott tells of in the Fortunes of Nigel. 
These allusions are part of an argument which places the 
date of this play in the years 1603-4. A better evidence for 
this late date lies in the style and metre of the drama, 
but this evidence might just as well date it earlier, 
or even later, in, let me say, 1606, after King Lear; 
and some reasons might be suggested for such a 
conjecture. 

There are also many resemblances in the thoughts on 
death, and on grave problems of life, and even in words 
and phrases, between this play and Hamlet, Macbeth, and 
King Lear, which suggest that Measure for Measure 
belongs to the years between 1601 and 1606, the period of 
the great tragedies. It is commonly put between Othello 
and Macbeth. I might put it alongside of either Troilus 
and Gressida or Timon of Athens — after the first, before 
the latter. This, however, is conjecture, and the conjec- 
ture is only based on a feeling, which may be called 
literary, that the style, the metrical movement, the not 



140 LECTURES ON SHAKESPEARE 

infrequent abruptness and comparative obscurity of the 
verse, and, above all, the temper of the play, are not as 
much in harmony with Othello and Macbeth as they are 
with Troilus or Timon. Moreover, Othello and Macbeth 
are written with Shakespeare's highest power, and in every 
part of them the power is equal to that which he desired 
to represent. In Measure for Measure the power is not 
the same as it is in Othello or Macbeth. It wavers : great in 
one page, it is at a much lower level in the next. Nor do 
the characters always explain themselves. In Othello and 
Macbeth they do. Again, the poetry, its imaginative reach, 
its grip on the heart of the thing or thought in hand, 
are, beyond expression, penetrating, equal, and splendid 
in Othello and Macbeth. In Measure for Measure these 
qualities are sometimes as great as they are in Othello and 
Macbeth, but they are so in patches. There are passages 
where this high poetry lags behind, where clearness and 
splendour seem not to have deserted the house of Shake- 
speare's imagination, but to be less at home in it. This is 
strange, I repeat, if this play was written between Othello 
and Macbeth. However, the critics may be right. Shake- 
speare, like Homer, sometimes sleeps. 

Perhaps the subject influenced Shakespeare wrongly. 
An artist sometimes seizes a subject which he thinks will 
suit his mood, or which suddenly attracts him, and it 
comes to pass, when he has been at work on it for some 
time, that he finds it is not in sympathy with his genius, 
or that it does not turn out, and come home to him, as well 
as he expected. He would like to throw it aside, but 
either it seems to him that he ought to finish it, that it is 
due to his genius to master it ; or the work may exercise 
a kind of tyranny over him. In any of these cases, he is 
sure not to do as good work as he would do did he love 
his subject, or did his subject at the time altogether suit 
him. And this may be true of Shakespeare and Measure 



MEASURE FOR MEASURE 141 

for Measure. If it were, I do not wonder, for the subject 
was eminently disagreeable. 1 A society eaten to its core 
by mere fornication, which is the social basis of the play, 
is not a delightful milieu for a great artist to choose his 
subject from; nor, in itself, does the subject contain or 
produce any of the deep-striking passions whose presenta- 
tion arrests the souls of men. No great, noble, or terrible 
tragedy such as we find in Macbeth, Othello, or Lear, 
could come out of it. In order to get into the subject an 
arresting representation of the passions, he is driven to 
create extremes of human nature — Isabella, of enskied but 
exaggerated chastity ; Angelo, of revolting, though sudden 
sensualism; Claudio, shamefully dishonoured by the fear of 
death. The subject carries with it, and perforce, elements 
of sensationalism. It was also predoomed, though naturally 
tragic, to be turned into a Comedy, and Measure for 
Measure wears with extraordinary awkwardness the gar- 
ments of Comedy. Shakespeare did his best with it. 
He so arranged events as to make this ugly story into 
a representation in the characters of high-souled chastity ; 
of the break-up of mere outward virtue into sensualism ; 
of the fear of death; and, as a side issue, of the 
danger and limits of authority, — and these are subjects 
which underlie the Drama. But they have, in an ex- 
treme representation of them, been foisted into the 
story. They do not grow naturally out of it. Isabella's 
chastity is mingled with an ascetic severity. Angelo's 
hypocrisy is almost out of nature. Claudio's fear of death 
borders on meanness ; is not in character with his training, 
his rank, and his honour as a gentleman. Shakespeare, 
in this play (even in the minor characters), is, not un- 
frequently, a little outside nature. He owed that, I think, 

1 An old play, Promos and Cassandra, is said to be Shakespeare's 
original. If so, he has transformed it. Also, the romantic image of 
Mariana in the moated grange is his own invention. 



142 LECTURES ON SHAKESPEARE 

to the choice he made of a subject. It was a sword which 
did not quite fit his hand. Whenever he struck with it 
his blow went somewhat awry. 

I believe, as I have said elsewhere, that there was a 
twist in Shakespeare's life at this time, of which we know 
nothing, and which turned into gloom and sometimes 
into a transient cynicism the charming nature of the 
man. There is no reason, some may say, to make this 
conjecture ; it is sufficient to say that, having reached 
middle age, his thought turned to the stern aspect of the 
world, and resolved to write about the greater passions 
which afflict men, and the deeper sins which tempt them. 
It may be so, but this does not explain the immense change, 
within a year or two, from the spirit of Twelfth Night to 
that of Macbeth or Othello so well as the first conjecture, 
and it conceives Shakespeare more as a contemplative 
moral philosopher than as an artist. I do not believe 
that he deliberately set himself, while he was the same 
man within who wrote the Twelfth Night or Julius Ccesar, 
to describe with an extraordinary and heightened passion 
the agonies of Lear and Othello, the crime and terror of 
Macbeth. No artist, working out of his own soul, would 
do that; or if he did, he would not do it well. No; 
Shakespeare chose his subjects in accordance with the 
passionate emotions and drift of his own soul ; and the 
tragic of these plays, and the Cynicism of Troilus and 
Timon, were the expression (I do not say of his own 
personal circumstances or feelings — it was plainly his 
habit to conceal these) but of the general temper of his 
soul, changed, by events of which we know nothing, from 
a cheerful to a grim outlook on the world. The atmo- 
sphere of his life was charged with rain and storm, with 
lightning and thunder; and out of it came Othello, 
Macbeth, Lear; and out of them came intervals of cynicism. 

It is characteristic of such a temper of mind to pass at 



MEASURE FOR MEASURE 143 

times into self- contempt, and to transfer that contempt to 
the world. A man then becomes hard, sarcastic, cynical 
or savage. And then he writes, while the bitterness lasts, 
in the mood which rules Troilus and Cressida or Timon 
of Athens) and the result is that he gets rid, by such 
expression, of the cynicism which, if he has a beautiful 
soul such as Shakespeare had, he hates with all his heart. 

Further still, there may be a period of transition 
between the noble sympathy with the sorrows of the 
world's sin and error which appears in the great tragedies 
and the full cynicism of Timon or Troilus ; and then the 
dramatist is likely to write a play like Measure for 
Measure, which is half cynical, which has the tail of a 
comedy and the body of a tragedy, neither quite one 
nor quite the other. 

Whatever it was that troubled Shakespeare, it did not 
trouble his intellect or his imagination. It seems, on 
the contrary, to have stimulated and expanded them. 
Macbeth, Othello, Lear reach a level no man in England 
ever reached. But in Timon of Athens, Troilus, and in 
Measure for Measure neither his intellect nor his im- 
agination seems to work with a similar power. I should 
like to repeat more fully what I have already said. 
These plays are unequal, and their elements are not as 
harmoniously mixed together as they are in Macbeth, 
Othello, or Lear. Nor is there the same certainty of 
touch or the same inventive variety. Their language also 
is frequently more obscure than it should be, and their 
metre is sometimes broken andjunmusical. It seems as 
if Shakespeare did not care to take them up afterwards, 
and to correct and polish them. The style, when it 
is concerned with great matters, is as good as it is in 
Macbeth or Othello, but it is not so steadfast through- 
out, nor so consistently excellent. On graver subject- 
matters (as, for example, the Fear of Death in Measure for 



144 LECTURES ON SHAKESPEARE 

Measure), his thought is as deep and far-reaching as in 
the large tragedies ; and the subtle play of his intellect 
(as in the scenes between Isabella and Angelo) is equally 
great; but this intellectual power does not grip the 
situation so closely in other parts of the play. There are 
times, that is, when the sails of his intellect are not as 
full of wind, do not draw so well as usual. The power 
wavers — now steady, now unsteady. 

I cannot put this down altogether to Shakespeare's 
wrong choice of a subject. It is, I suggest, due to the 
wave of cynicism which now and then at this time passed 
over him, and which, after this play, and when he had 
written Troilus and his part of Timon of Athens, ebbed 
away from him for ever. There is not a trace of it in 
Antony and Cleopatra and Coriolanus, which (accord- 
ing to the investigators) followed on Timon, and pre- 
ceded the three last dramas. 

Cynicism, even of this transient kind which I impute 
to Shakespeare, lowers all the powers of genius. It 
has its own powers, powers of the pit, but they are 
jealous and envious of the heavenly powers in genius; 
and they taint and depress them. They did so now 
to Shakespeare. Othello, Macbeth, Lear, Hamlet are 
not cynical. Pity overrides their darkness, and we 
feel that human justice is done, even if the gods, as 
in Lear, seem unjust. In Measure for Measure — inter- 
calated among the great tragedies — we are in contact with 
this transient cynicism, and we are not touched with pity 
for the sorrowful or the guilty. We can feel little com- 
passion for Mariana's pain ; and her conduct at the end 
of the play, though natural enough, is wanting in womanly 
dignity and honour. Her excited desire to have Angelo 
for life as her husband (knowing, as she does, his baseness 
in and out) could only exist in a society which had lost 
good taste, honourable feeling, and the common sense of 



MEASURE FOR MEASURE 145 

life. I have no pity for Claudio. He dishonours himself. 
Angelo is too vile for pity, and Isabella too austere. More- 
over, justice is not done in the play, and too light a treat- 
ment of natural justice, as if it did not matter, is a main 
characteristic of cynicism. Angelo, whose criminality is 
almost overdone, who violates his solemn oath to Isabella, 
who promises at the price of her dishonour to save her 
brother's life, and who takes that life within a few hours 
of his ravishment of the sister — lest Claudio should here- 
after reveal his iniquity — this Angelo is saved, married, 
and lives at ease in Vienna. It is the end that cynicism 
would make. We are defrauded of justice ; and we feel 
with indignation that we are defrauded. And then 
every one who stands by at the end when this failure of 
justice takes place, even Isabella, is lowered in our eyes. 
The whole society where such a pardon was accepted is 
in a degraded state, and we are asked to accept it as all 
right. Indeed, this degeneration of society is plain in the 
play. From the Duke down to Barnardine (with the sole 
exception of Isabella), none of the characters belong to a 
noble society. They are all weak or wicked. The Duke 
has not enough intellect to rule rightly, though he knows 
what is right. Conscious of his want of force as a gover- 
nor, he becomes a student, and then when things become 
too bad to be endured, the only way he can think of 
to discover or mend them is to become a spy, sniff about 
in the prisons, and try to detect Angelo, whose goodness 
he suspects, in sin. We must remember, during the 
whole conduct of the play, that the Duke knows, even 
when he hands the government over to Angelo, the 
dishonourable way in which Angelo had some years 
before acted towards Mariana. He has been affianced 
to her; she is greatly in love with him. Her brother 
was drowned, and with him Mariana's dowry. Angelo, 
when her money was lost, threw her away, and to 

K 



146 LECTURES ON SHAKESPEARE 

excuse this, spread evil reports about her reputation. 
This villainy in the past is in the Duke's knowledge; 
and it is plain that one of the reasons he disguises him- 
self is to find out whether Angelo is all he seems to be. 
' Lord Angelo,' he says, ' is precise ' : 

Stands at a guard with envy ; scarce confesses 
That his blood flows, or that his appetite 
Is more to bread than stone ; hence shall we see, 
If power change purpose, what our seemers be. 

Very good business for a friar — but surely quite unworthy 
of a great ruler ; and so thinks Friar Thomas to whom 
the Duke reveals his trickeries. The Duke succeeds in 
his aims, but we do not like his way; and his scenic 
business, with its low cleverness, at the end of the play is 
equally unworthy of a high-minded ruler. Then, Escalus 
is a good-natured piece of commonplace. Angelo, a 
hypocrite in grain, slips into an odious villain, without a 
trace of the gentleman, till he is condemned to death. 
Claudio is a weak-minded gentleman, who has lost the 
fibrous stuff of a man in a dissipated life. Lucio and his 
friends call themselves gentlemen, but their conversation 
is as abominable as it is feebly cynical. Nor has it the 
saving grace of humour. When we read what these 
etiolated gentlemen say, how deeply do we regret Sir Toby 
Belch ! Lucio, who shows some sparks of gentlehood 
at the beginning of the play, falls towards the end into 
gross blackguardism of mind. What he is then does not 
fit. in with himself as we first see him. This is an instance 
of the wavering hand of Shakespeare of which I have 
spoken. Then Abhorson is as his name, and Barnardine 
is a picture of the brute in man, in whom the brutal 
elements, accompanied by even the lowest ray of intelli- 
gence, are far worse than in any animal. As to Mariana, 
she is a nonentity. Isabella alone shines clear and pure, 



MEASURE FOR MEASURE 147 

an unapproached star ; but when Shakespeare marries her 
to the Duke, his irony is almost too deep. 

What possessed Shakespeare, if not a passing wave of 
cynicism, to descend to this base and ugly realism, un- 
relieved, as he would have made it at another time, by 
humour? Humour lifts the base; where laughter is, 
wickedness is redeemable. But the sole worthy effort of 
humour in this play is in the sketch of Elbow the 
Constable ; and it is below the ordinary level of Shake- 
speare's humour. Where is, we ask as we read, the hand 
and the mind which created Dogberry and Verges ? 

There are, it is true, some snatches of natural humour in 
the lower characters. Pompey, Froth, as well as Elbow, 
make us smile at human nature. Abhorson is not with- 
out his fantasy. He objects to a bawd like Pompey 
being associated with him as the executioner. ' A bawd, 
sir? Fie upon him, he will discredit our mystery.' 
Even Barnardine has a touch of humour. He refuses to 
be executed because he has been drunk all night. He 
refuses to die except at his own consent. 

Barnar. I swear I will not die to-day for any man's persuasion. 
Duke. But hear you, — 

Barnar. Not a word : if you have anything to say to me, come to 
my ward ; for thence will not I to-day. 

And they are true to their nature. In the state of society 
Shakespeare is painting, the lower ranges of the people 
who are consciously vicious are really much better folk 
than the upper classes who are vicious and conceal it. 
The frankness with which they maintain that their vice 
is natural, and that they mean to continue it, has much 
more chance of change into a higher life than the hypo- 
crisy of Angelo, or the calculated looseness of the rest of 
the gentlemen of the play. 

These were the elements and characters Shakespeare 
chose to combine in this play ; and as none of them, save 



148 LECTURES ON SHAKESPEARE 

Isabella, were noble enough, or strong enough in passion 
or in intellect, in what they did or in what they suffered, 
to be woven into the loom of Tragedy, Shakespeare was 
forced to make his work into a Comedy; Angelo and 
Claudio are saved from death, Isabella is married to the 
Duke. To do that, Shakespeare, with great cleverness 
(too great, I think, for noble art), invented the story of 
Mariana, which saves Isabella's chastity, and by a side 
issue Claudio's life, and in the end Angelo's. 

The play makes a poor comedy — one of the amorphous 
things they call a tragi- comedy. It ought to have been a 
tragedy. But in order to be that, Shakespeare would have 
had to have conceived all the characters on nobler lines, 
even Isabella's. Angelo would then have accomplished 
Isabella's ruin ; Claudio would have been really sacrificed 
to Angelo's fear; Isabella would have slain herself like 
Lucretia ; the Duke would have had to be lifted out of a 
spy into a steadfast justicer — and Angelo, despairing and 
accursed, been carried away, like Iago, to meet his death. 
Every one, on the contrary (after all the odious business), 
departs home in peace, to go on, no doubt, in the same 
fashion as before; the Duke and Claudio just as weak, 
Isabella even more austere, Lucio and his friends just as 
dissipated and degraded, Mariana as foolish, and Angelo 
frightened into a deeper hypocrisy. The happy ending is 
really a more wretched ending than that of King Lear. 
After the tragic horror, the social convulsion of that 
play, the society in which these dreadful things were 
wrought will improve. After the close of Measure for 
Measure, the social state will worsen. Its guilt will be 
more concealed, but it will not be less, but more. 

Again, with regard to this play, I have sometimes 
wondered if Shakespeare, for once in his life, wrote with 
a moral aim — to paint the baseness of a society in which 
fornication flourished, and ate away the power, greatness 



MEASURE FOR MEASURE 149 

and magnanimity of a State. If so, this aim being 
mixed up with an artistic one, would partly account for 
the broken, unequal work, for the want of grip on the 
main issues. If a man's aim be single, his whole work 
is full of light ; if it be double, his work is in twilight, 
and confused in it. 

And cynicism is often very fond of being moral. It 
never lays before us the unreached perfection, but it 
does enlarge (like the writer of Ecclesiastes) on mor- 
ality, on the impropriety and unprofitableness of vice, 
on the peace that comes from obedience to law, from 
harmonising oneself with the ordinary course of things, 
however wretched an affair the cynic may think it to 
be. And then, if this cynic, in this mood, be a writer 
of plays, he would write, if he could, just such a play as 
Measure for Measure, with a good worldly ending, to 
warn men against the foolish vices which make society 
less comfortable, more disagreeable, more difficult for 
clever men to manage. Perhaps Shakespeare, for a 
brief period, fell into this error. If so, let us be for 
ever grateful that he never did it again. He has 
certainly failed to make outward morality interesting 
or attractive. Angelo's morality breaks to pieces before 
a sudden temptation, and is replaced by hypocrisy. 
Isabella's morality never succeeds in making us love her. 
The Duke's morality, which is that of a philosopher 
ignorant of human nature or its passions, awakens repug- 
nance in every one on whom it is imposed. His discourse 
to Claudio concerning the indifference with which the 
wise man should look on life, is very well put as ignorant 
philosophy, but is ludicrous to a young man in whose 
veins life was running fast and dearly. Claudio endures 
it (being from one whom he thinks a priest), but it has 
no influence on him. Mariana's morality is on her lips, 
not in her desire. On the whole, though there are 



150 LECTURES ON SHAKESPEARE 

excellent things said about morality in the play, though 
the thoughts expressed in it on moral questions are 
profound and ennobled by genius, morality itself is, in 
this play, left without attractiveness; and as if to 
emphasise this, its highest form in Isabella is made by 
Shakespeare to be the cause of Angelo's worst immorality. 
It is because she is so good that his cold nature is, at 
last, kindled into evil desire. This is a dramatic turn 
which is, I think, not far removed from cynicism. Shake- 
speare himself must have smiled a little bitterly when he 
made Angelo, on Isabella's leaving him, discuss himself, 
with great surprise, in this fashion — 

What 's this, what 's this ? Is this her fault or mine ? 

The tempter or the tempted, who sins most ? 

Ha! 

Not she ; nor doth she tempt : but it is I 

That, lying by the violet in the sun, 

Do as the carrion does, not as the flower, 

Corrupt with virtuous season. Can it be 

That modesty may more betray our sense 

Than woman's lightness % Having waste ground enough, 

Shall we desire to raze the sanctuary, 

And pitch our evils there ? 0, fie, fie, fie ! 

What dost thou, or what art thou, Angelo 1 

Dost thou desire her foully for those things 

That make her good ? 

Most dangerous 
Is that temptation that doth goad us on 
To sin in loving virtue. 

Finally, before I come directly to the play, the fifth Act, 
in which all the tangle is undone, is, in its universal 
forgiveness of the odious wickedness we have gone 
through — as if justice were of no matter in comparison 
with ease and peace — the most cynical part of the 
play. It is really, in the matter of Angelo, more like 
a light scoff at justice than a display of mercy. The 
Duke retires with Isabella as his wife. It seems a most 



MEASURE FOR MEASURE 151 

unfitting marriage. We may hope she gave him some 
strength of character, and stopped his spying expeditions. 
The marriage of Angelo and Mariana would have been 
quite right had Angelo's life been immediately put an 
end to. As it is, it is most unfitting ; and Isabella had 
better have been silent than speak for it. Then, the 
whole conduct of the Act by the Duke is to the last 
degree fantastical ; a piece of unworthy trickery. All 
the same, it would be effective on the stage; full of 
action, surprises, unexpected situations, ceaseless move- 
ment ; and Angelo's terror, during the slow revealing of his 
sin, would supply a good actor with plenty of business. 
Shakespeare has in it sacrificed high dramatic simplicity 
and dignity to stage cleverness and sensational efficiency. 

The play opens with the Duke handing over his powers 
to Angelo and Escalus; but chiefly to Angelo whose 
austere and honourable worth is known to all Vienna. 
The Duke does this in one of those philosophic and moral 
speeches which are characteristic of this play; which 
occur in it like golden patches on a somewhat dirty gown ; 
and which do not always fit happily into the circum- 
stances. These half-orations are full of Shakespeare's 
wise and serious thought on life and death, and many of 
their profound phrases have become texts for the house- 
hold uses of mankind. The Duke is one of their chief 
speakers. But the more he speaks in this fashion, the less 
do we think him fit to be a ruler of men. He is a thinker, 
not a man of action ; a dilettante philosopher in a wrong 
place. He makes an excellent Friar, and it would have 
been well for Vienna had he continued a Friar — to console 
the dying, to help poor maidens out of trouble, and to 
preach to naughty people. But to manage a State, to set 
its evils right — one has only to think that he let Angelo 
off the judgment to see that he is not fit to be a Duke. 



152 LECTURES ON SHAKESPEARE 

Here is his first little piece of philosophic morality ; and 
an excellent thing it is. He is urging Angelo to make full 
use of his virtues in affairs — 

Heaven doth with us as we with torches do, 
j , Not light them for themselves ; for if our virtues 
Did not go forth of us, 'twere all alike 
As if we had them not. Spirits are not finely touch d 
But to fine issues ; nor Nature never lends 
The smallest scruple of her excellence, 
But, like a thrifty goddess, she determines 
Herself the glory of a creditor, 
Both thanks and use. 

With that, the Duke departs, not on a journey, but to 
take up his office as an ecclesiastical spy on his Dukedom. 
And Angelo, as we hear from the next scene, has put into 
practice an old law against fornication which had fallen 
out of use, and under which he condemns Claudio to death, 
though Claudio's offence against it had been committed in 
the past when the law was not enforced. But Shakespeare 
makes it plain that natural justice would consider the 
penalty of death too severe for this sin ; that its infliction 
would bring justice into disrepute; and that it was still more 
unjust to make the penalty retrospective; and finally, in 
the mouth of Pompey — Act n. Sc. 2 — that such a law was 
absurd. Vienna would be depopulated. Sexual appetite 
is stronger than the fear of death. 

Then, another view of the matter is presented. Claudio, 
who is condemned by this unjust law, repents his deed, 
though he had made the woman his wife in all but 
1 outward order ' ; and, being an honest gentleman, tries to 
persuade himself that the law is just. Yet Shakespeare, 
by his mouth, shows how an unjust law lowers the high 
prestige of the lawgivers, and with that, the honour of 
j ustice. Claudio thinks that Angelo, who, by the way, has 
sinned twice as deeply as Claudio, is seeking for mere 
popularity by this severe morality. Like a new broom, he 



MEASURE FOR MEASURE 153 

does too much ; or he wants to sting the ' body public ' 
into the belief that at last they have got a governor. 
Therefore he puts into force a law which has hung unused 
on the wall for nineteen years. There's yet a chance 
however of my life, he tells Lucio ; go and beg my sister, 
who is to enter the cloister to-day, to persuade Angelo to 
be less strict. Her youth has a ' prone and speechless 
dialect ' which moves men, and her discourse is persuasive. 
Thus Angelo and Isabella are brought into touch with 
one another. 

Both Angelo and Isabella, who meet like black and 
white, are sketched, in Shakespeare's preparing fashion, 
before they come together. They are both severely chaste, 
but chastity in Isabella is part of a noble and good nature 
quite capable of passion ; in Angelo part of a mean and bad 
one. Angelo's blood is said to be very snow-broth. He 
does not feel the stings and motions of appetite; chaste 
because he is cold, not because he is in love with virtue. 
Therefore, when temptation does come, he has no guard. 
Once his blood is heated, the very novelty of it is greatly 
attractive ; he yields at once to the sensual impulse, and 
with so great an intensity that all his seeming virtues 
topple into odious vices. Great is the fall of this house 
built upon the sand. 

As to Isabella, we meet her first at the convent. Her 
severity at once appears in her conversation with Sister 
Francisca. 

Isab. And have you nuns no farther privileges ? 

Fran. Are not these large enough ? 

Isab. Yes, truly : I speak not as desiring more ; 
But rather wishing a more strict restraint 
Upon the sisterhood, the votarists of Saint Clare. 

The impression she makes on Lucio, that wild gentleman, 
accords with this. He does not dare to play with her cold 

serenity. 

I hold you as a thing ensky'd and sainted. 



154 LECTURES ON SHAKESPEARE 

And when he tells her Claudio's story, and begs her to 
soften Angelo's harshness, she shrinks at first from interfer- 
ing 1 . The sin is so hateful to her she can scarcely bear to 
plead for pity. But at last she yields. Then they meet — 
Angelo and Isabella — he resolved to maintain his authority 
by holding fast to the sentence he has pronounced on 
Claudio, she to induce him, for the sake of mercy, to reverse 
that sentence. It was a situation that Shakespeare would 
love to tackle; and indeed it has brought out all his 
powers. There is not a subtler piece of work in all the 
plays. We must remember that Isabella was a young 
girl, forced to speak of a subject she blushed to think of 
before a grown, grave man ; and moreover feeling, in her 
young and ignorant austerity, that the law is just which 
condemns her brother. This accounts for her seeming 
coldness at the beginning of her pleading, and for the 
shyness as well as the conviction with which she suddenly 
gives up her effort, when Angelo declares the law — 

just but severe law ! 
I had a brother, then. 

And she turns to go. You are too cold, says Lucio. 
And Isabella, while confessing that the law is just, now 
pleads that it should be tempered with mercy, and that 
mercy ought to be an attribute of authority. Angelo has 
the right, she thinks, by law to modify the law. And 
henceforth her appeal is directed to him as a ruler. Like 
Shylock (not for revenge, but to support his austere 
reputation), Angelo stands for law. Like Portia, Isabella 
maintains the sanctity of law ; but claims that mercy is 
a part of eternal justice, and may very well be a part of 
earthly justice. 

Indeed, it is worth remarking that through the whole 
of this play the question of Authority and its limits, of the 
temptations it brings to those who possess it, and of the 
sins it may fall into, is debated and illustrated by Shake- 



MEASURE FOR MEASURE 155 

speare. It is one of three great subjects which engaged 
his thought, as he, musing on the world of men, wrote this 
play. The second is the Fear of Death, and the third is 
the terrible rapidity with which sin, and especially sensual 
sin because of its public shame, generates sin ; with which 
seven devils are born of one, and fifty of seven. 

The Duke, as we have seen, in handing over all authority 
to Angelo, has spoken of its duties. Claudio, on his way 
to prison, says that this demigod Authority claims to slay 
or save as it will, like a deity — and he meant that this 
claim is more than ought to be made by any man. It is 
only divine authority which may say, ' What I will, I will.' 
Then, he touches the temptations to abuse of authority. 
He feels that Angelo's death-sentence on him is to prove 
to the people how active he is as a ruler, how severely 
just ; that is, Angelo is unjustly using his authority to exalt 
himself. Then Escalus, pleading for Claudio, bids Angelo 
consider whether he has thought enough of what he him- 
self might do, had he been similarly tempted. Let the 
source of authority think, when it censures sin, whether 
its own life is clear. It is one thing to be tempted, 
answers Angelo, another thing to fall. When I, that 
censure Claudio, fall, let me die his death. Thus, in an 
awful ignorance, he pronounces his own condemnation. 

Then, again, the Duke has his say on the matter. Great 

authority is the target of the world it rules. All arrows, 

barbed with pain, are shot into it. 

place and greatness ! millions of false eyes 
Are stnck upon thee ! volumes of report 
Run with these false and most contrarious quests 
Upon thy doings ! thousand escapes of wit 
Make thee the father of their idle dreams, 
And rack thee in their fancies ! 

This is the Duke's philosophic turn, and it has little force 
in real life. But now, the whole question is presented 
to us in a vivid, passionate, human situation, with life and 



156 LECTURES ON SHAKESPEARE 

death dependent on its solution. Isabella stands, pleading 
for her brother's life before severe authority; and she 
confronts authority with the equal duty of mercy, and 
joins with this the personal appeal and demand which 
Escalus has already made — that the executor of the law 
**£ should consider whether he also might have sinned in the 
same way as the man he condemns. If he consider the 
weakness of his human nature, he will be led towards 
mercy. Mercy ! why, it belongs to great place. Nothing 
becomes authority like mercy. Let Authority on earth 
think what the highest Authority has done. 

Why, all the souls that were were forfeit once ; 
And He that might the vantage best have took 
Found out the remedy. How would you be, 
If He, which is the top of judgment, should 
But judge you as you are ? ! think on that : 
And mercy then will breathe within your lips, 
Like man new made. 

The law, the law, cries Angelo, quite untouched. Then 
Isabella, whose passion has been deepening minute by 
minute, who has now lost all her coldness, whose own 
eloquence and voice have wrought her into the natural 
intensity of her character, turns to a scornful wrath. She 
feels that this severity is not justice but its counterfeit, 
and she holds up the authority which says ' What I will, 
I will/ to blame and ridicule. I wonder how James the 
First liked that ? Let authority beware lest it become 
tyranny — 

So you must be the first that gives this sentence, 

And he, that suffers. 0, it is excellent 

To have a giant's strength ; but it is tyrannous 

To use it like a giant. 
Lucio. That 's well said. 

Isab. (in scorn). Could great men thunder, 

As Jove himself does, Jove would ne'er be quiet, 

For every pelting, petty officer 

Would use his heaven for thunder. 

Nothing but thunder ! Merciful Heaven, 

Thou rather with thy sharp and sulphurous bolt 



MEASURE FOR MEASURE 157 

Split'st the unwedgeable and gnarled oak 

Than the soft myrtle : but man, proud man, 

Drest in a little brief authority, 

Most ignorant of what he 's most assured, 

His glassy essence, like an angry ape, 

Plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven 

As make the angels weep ; who, with our spleens, 

"Would all themselves laugh mortal. 

Intellect and imagination are married in the words. Into 
a full power of both her passion has kindled her. And 
Angelo seems touched. But it is the woman not the 
matter of her speech which touches him. Sin is already 
crouching now, like a wild beast, at the door of his heart. 
One more touch, and the brute will be within ! And this 
touch is given by Isabella's bold attack on his authority, 
and on him. She suddenly changes from imaginative 
soaring to sharp sententiousness ; and this with a keenness 
and swiftness enough to trouble any man. And still her 
subject-matter is Authority. Great authority thinks it 
has licence to do what in lesser men is wrong, and to call 
it a slight error. Great men — so runs her sarcasm — may 
jest with saints, and think it wit ; in lesser men 'tis foul 

profanation. 

That in the captain 's but a choleric word, 
Which in the soldier is flat blasphemy. 

And she looks straight at Angelo, whom she, like Claudio, 

now suspects of making advantage to himself out of his 

severity, of using his power to increase his repute, — and 

her keen eyes and words probe him to the soul. 

Ang. Why do you put these sayings upon me ? 

Isab. Because authority, though it err like others, 
Hath yet a kind of medicine in itself, 
That skins the vice o' the top. Go to your bosom ; 
Knock there, and ask your heart what it doth know 
That 's like my brother's fault : if it confess 
A natural guiltiness such as is his, 
Let it not sound a thought upon your tongue 
Against my brother's life. 

Ang. She speaks, and 'tis 

Such sense, that my sense breeds with it. 



158 LECTUEES ON SHAKESPEARE 

Angelo is not thinking now of law or justice, but of the 
woman. She has youth and beauty, but so had many in 
Vienna. But now he has seen her youth and beauty 
glorified by passion, imagination, and intellect. Also, her 
soul has made her supremely beautiful as she pleaded ; and 
her fire and scorn and wrath have added to her loveli- 
ness. All that is noble and good in her has so enhanced 
her personal charm, that it stirs, in this base nature, 
not reverence and noble love, but sensual desire; and 
when she ends by saying that her prayers for him will 
enter Heaven, he is thinking of leading her down into 
Hell. 

Then comes Shakespeare's presentation of the tremen- 
dous rapidity with which sin, and sensual sin especially 
when it is accompanied by personal dishonour, doubles and 
redoubles its progeny. It is not in youth, but in middle 
age, that the fiercest temptations come, that the worst 
overthrows are wrought. And the temptation arrives with 
appalling suddenness, like the typhoon out of a clear sky. 
All is commonplace life and peace at noon. Before the 
afternoon has come, the certainties of life have suffered 
earthquake, the soul is devastated. It was so with Angelo. 
I have quoted his soliloquy when Isabella leaves him; 
here is his soliloquy when he waits her next morning. 
He is no hypocrite to himself. He knows and reveals 
how irresistibly his evil passion has gripped his will. 

When I would pray and think, I think and pray- 
To several subjects. Heaven hath my empty words ; 
Whilst my invention, hearing not my tongue, 
Anchors on Isabel : Heaven in my mouth, 
As if I did but only chew his name ; 
And in my heart the strong and swelling evil 
Of my conception. 

Weary of State affairs, he would give all his gravity 
of which he is proud, to be as light as an idle feather. 
Place and form, once everything to him, only wrench awe 
from fools, and tie the wise to hypocrisy. The surging 



MEASURE FOR MEASURE 159 

blood of sense commands him altogether, and disenables 
all the powers within him of their fitness to resist or 
command his appetite. In that temper he meets Isabella 
the second time. The dialogue is even more subtle than 
the last, but finally Angelo is stung by his furious senses 
out of all delicate approaches, and is grossly clear. His 
first guilt begets brutality — and his brutality begets 
cruelty. ' I have begun/ he cries, 

And now I give my sensual race the rein. 

' And if thou dost not yield, Claudio shall not only die, he 
shall die in torment ! ' So quick, so desperately quick, does 
baseness follow on baseness. He can scarcely be worse, we 
think, but he becomes viler still. When he has fulfilled, 
as he supposes, his sensual desire ; then, when one would 
have imagined that dishonour could go no further, the 
multiplication of guilt increases. He gives swift order for 
Claudio's hurried death — Claudio whom, at the price of 
his sister's honour, he has sworn to save. And the reason 
for this damnable villainy makes it still more damnable. 
It is lest Claudio hereafter might tell the story and injure 
his repute. Isabella, he thinks, will, for her own sake, not 
dare to betray him. With this almost inconceivable 
rapidity, to this multitudinous hurry of guilt on guilt, one 
temptation, yielded to, may bring a cold, precise, and 
steady man in jbwenty-four hours. It is a terrible study, 
but it is true. Morality is not always virtue. 

The third matter Shakespeare dwells on is Death, and 
the fear of it. He does not debate it ; he presents various 
aspects of it in his characters. 

It first appears in Isabella's talk with Angelo. Death 

is nothing, no, nor tormented death, in comparison with 

honour — 

were I under the terms of death, 

The impression of keen whips I 'Id wear as rubies, 

And strip myself to death, as to a bed 

That longing have been sick for, ere I 'Id yield 

My body up to shame. 



160 LECTURES ON SHAKESPEARE 

Then the Duke, as philosopher and priest, urges Claudio to 
be content with death. After all, what is life but a long 
death ? and life is something that only fools would keep. 
Our life is servile to the elements that hourly afflict it. We 
labour to shun death, yet run to it all the while. Death 
is no more than sleep. And life is not really happy, nor 
certain, nor rich, nor kindly. Disease makes our organs 
of life desire death. 

Thou hast nor youth nor age, 
But, as it were, an after- dinner's sleep, 
Dreaming on both ; for all thy blessed youth 
Becomes as aged, and doth beg the alms 
Of palsied eld ; and when thou art old and rich, 
Thou hast neither heat, affection, limb, nor beauty, 
To make thy riches pleasant. What 's yet in this, 
That bears the name of life 1 Yet in this life 
Lie hid moe thousand deaths : yet death we fear, 
That makes these odds all even. 

This is cheap philosophy on the Duke's lips ; he is in no 
danger of death. And a thousand philosophers, comfort- 
able in their studies, have cheaply said the same things, 
and never influenced the world of men. Those are not 
the considerations which make men despise death. Not 
one of them drove the Japanese up the forts at Port 
Arthur. 

Claudio, in courtesy to the priest, and having no hope, 
accepts them with a certain irony : 

To sue to live, I find I seek to die ; 

And seeking death, find life : let it come on. 

But we know how little impression they have made when 
he sees a chance of life — how even dishonour seems better 
than death to his youthful blood. For now Isabella comes 
in to tell her story, and her view of death being an un- 
considered trifle when dishonour is in the other scale, 
conflicts with his. In this vivid conversation, where two 
souls meet in a dreadful reality, the love of life, the 
fear of death are tossed as subjects to and fro. 



MEASURE FOR MEASURE 



161 



' Is there no remedy ? ' asks Claudio. ' None/ answers 
Isabella, ' but such as will strip you of honour.' ' Let me 
know the point/ Claudio replies. 

Isab. 0, I do fear thee, Claudio ; and I quake, 

Lest thou a feverous life shouldst entertain, 
And six or seven winters more respect 
Than a perpetual honour. Darest thou die ? 
The sense of death is most in apprehension ; 

Oh, answers Claudio, with a young noble's habitual 

courage, 

If I must die 
I will encounter darkness as a bride 
And hug it in my arms. 

Then she tells him how Angelo has encountered her, 

and how 

If I would yield him my virginity 
Thou mightst be freed. 

Thou shalt not do it, cries Claudio. If it were my life, 

she answers, I would throw it down for your deliverance 

as frankly as a pin. But now the fresh youth in Claudio 

calls on him to live. It is not the fear of death, but the 

force of life in him which makes him say — ' Sure, it is no 

sin, Isabel.' One sees her face, as she looks into his 

eyes, change every moment. It is a terrible face and hour. 

Isab. What says my brother ? 

Claud. Death is a fearful thing. 

Isab. And shamed life a hateful. 

Claud. Ay, but to die, and go we know not where ; 

To lie in cold obstruction and to rot ; 

This sensible warm motion to become 

A kneaded clod ; and the delighted spirit 

To bathe in fiery floods, or to reside 

In thrilling region of thick-ribbed ice ; 

To be imprison'd in the viewless winds, 

And blown with restless violence round about 

The pendent world ; or to be worse than worst 

Of those that lawless and uncertain thought 

Imagine howling : — 'tis too horrible ! 

The weariest and most loathed worldly life 

That age, ache, penury and imprisonment 

Can lay on nature is a paradise 

To what we fear of death. 

L 



162 



LECTURES ON SHAKESPEARE 



ISAB. 

Claud. 



Isab. 



Claud. 
Isab. 



Alas, alas ! 

Sweet sister, let me live : 
What sin you do to save a brother's life, 
Nature dispenses with the deed so far 
That it becomes a virtue. 

you beast ! 

faithless coward ! dishonest wretch ! 
Wilt thou be made a man out of my vice ? 
Is 't not a kind of incest, to take life 

From thine own sister's shame ? What should I think ? 
Heaven shield my mother play'd my father fair ! 
For such a warped slip of wilderness 
Ne'er issued from his blood — Take my defiance ! 
Die, perish ! Might but my bending down 
Reprieve thee from thy fate, it should proceed ; 

1 '11 pray a thousand prayers for thy death, 
No word to save thee. 

Nay, hear me, Isabel. 

0, fie, fie, fie ! 
Thy sin 's not accidental, but a trade. 
Mercy to thee would prove itself a bawd : 
'Tis best that thou diest quickly. 



That sounds almost too harsh on a sister's lips to a 
brother who is to die to-morrow! And many have 
blamed Isabella for unwomanliness. But chastity such 
as hers, which repudiated all union with a man, even in 
marriage, as impure, was directly against nature, and has 
always induced into its advocates and practisers an 
unnaturalness in their actions and judgments. More- 
over, she was young, and the young have not known yet 
the weakness of human nature, and therefore do not 
excuse it. And she was innocent, and her innocence had 
been so insulted that she was on the top of rage and 
misery. And innocence is not merciful to sin or to 
dishonour. It is the experience of one's own guilt that 
awakens in us mercy and tenderness. And she was 
bitterly disappointed in her brother who should have 
thought her honour dearer than his life. And such 
strength as she possessed is severe on weakness, because 
it does not comprehend it. And she was austere by 



MEASURE FOR MEASURE 163 

nature. Her defiance of Claudio, her wrath, are in right 
harmony with her previous character; and finally, her 
native austerity on this special matter of chastity had 
been deepened by convent religion. I do not think that 
these considerations wholly excuse her fierce outburst, her 
flashing refusal to speak to Claudio any more. After all, 
he is her brother, and she seems to violate natural piety ; 
but they do lessen the offence of her words. She has been 
wrought to the very ultimate thrill of nervous strain by a 
desperate situation, containing the blackest insult to her 
womanhood. She who could then be careful of her words, 
who would not be lifted into a region where all human rela- 
tionships, brothers, husbands, fathers, were nothing in the 
balance, would not be true woman at all. Isabella is none 
the less noble for her outbreak. Its motives are sufficient, 
given the nature born with her, but her nature was a little 
a unnatural. And Cordelia, Desdemona, Imogen would not 
have put her reproach into these violent words. They 
would, however, have felt the greater part of it. 

The Duke, Isabella, Claudio have thus, driven by events, 
imaged before us their thoughts on Death and the fear 
of it. 

There is yet another presentation of the matter. 
Claudio's bottom thoughts (when the chance of escape is 
offered to him) are those which in a soft luxurious age, 
when sensual immorality has corrupted every rank in 
society, cultivated men think with regard to death. 
Shakespeare now contrasts this type with its extreme 
opposite. He paints, still haunting this question of 
death, the brutal man, hopelessly material, in Barnar- 
dine. Death to him is nothing at all. He thinks less 
of the deprivation of life than he thinks of the depri- 
vation of drink. He has no care for the past, the 
present, or the future. He makes his roaring joke in 
the presence of instant death. The sketch is rapid and 



164 LECTURES ON SHAKESPEARE 

vivid. No one can mistake Shakespeare's intention to 
contrast him with Claudio. Yet both, in different circum- 
stances and rank, are the direct products of the kind of 
society Shakespeare has painted in this play. 

Lastly, we are allowed to see how a man feels with 
regard to death, when, having been- on the summit of 
repute, he is cast hopelessly down into an abyss of shame. 

Then Angelo cries out — 

good prince, 
No longer session hold upon my shame, 
But let my trial be mine own confession : 
Immediate sentence then, and sequent death, 
Is all the grace I beg. 

I crave death more willingly than mercy ; 
'Tis my deserving, and I do entreat it. 

In the last depth of shame, as well as in the last height of 
ideal joy, death is welcome. 

These are grave subjects, and though they awaken our 
thought, they do not stir us to delight. Nor does the 
picture of a base society give us pleasure. Both have no 
charm ; nor have either the stern loveliness they might 
have had if the play had been a tragedy. There is but 
one thing in the whole play which has romantic beauty. 
It is the image of the moated Grange where Mariana 
mourns, and the song which her attendant sings. Its 
music shall close this essay, that, after much distress, 
the reader may have some pleasure — 

Take, 0, take those lips away, 

That so sweetly were forsworn ; 
And those eyes, the break of day, 

Lights that do mislead the morn : 
But my kisses bring again, 

bring again ; 
Seals of love, but seal'd in vain, 

seal'd in vain. 



VI 
OTHELLO 

Whatever we may say about Shakespeare's apartness 
from his own personality in his art or as an artist, the 
man who wrote the four great tragedies, of which Othello 
is one, has but a very little resemblance with the man 
who wrote Romeo and Juliet, or As You Like It. Eight 
years, twelve years, have done their work upon his soul. 
What their result was no one can fully explain. 

These years had also brought their experience into his 
art. During their passage he was incessant in practice and 
production, and as an artist had reached all he could of 
excellence in versification, in construction, in presentment, 
and in characterisation. The change in art power between 
Romeo and Juliet, 1592, and the four tragedies, especially 
Othello, 1604, is immense. All that his early work 
promised has been more than fulfilled. He stands now 
on the summit of the Genius of England. 

There was an equal change in his soul. There are 
artists who through practice of their art develop steadily 
in power of execution, but whose imagination is moved 
chiefly by their intellect ; whose thinking does not develop 
an emotion of an equal power to their thought; whose 
emotion, when it rises, does not enter vitally into the 
human life which surrounds them ; who practise their art 
for the sake of their art alone. In these men the level of 
the soul does not change. They have no fresh person- 
ality to put into their work ; their personality has become 
mannered into sameness, incapable of Ghange. Exquisite, 

165 



166 LECTURES ON SHAKESPEARE 

perhaps perfect, in technique, their art is rarely simple : 
it is sensuous by rule ; it cannot be impassioned. 

There seem to be some folk who think that Shakespeare 
was such a man. They say, or appear to say, that the 
change from plays like Twelfth Night to Hamlet, Othello, 
Macbeth and King Lear was owing only to an artistic 
desire in Shakespeare to make use, for art's sake, of his 
knowledge of the darker side of human life ; that when he 
wrote these tragedies he was much the same man within 
as when he wrote As You Like It ; that he had only taken 
up these tragic subjects in order to try his artist hand 
upon them. He beheld these fates of men, and recorded 
them, with the artist's externality. 

I look on that statement as almost incredible. The 
terrible passion, searching, unsatisfied emotion, which 
informs and burns in these four tragedies, which is 
clothed in words which seem hot from the furnace, now 
of one passion, now of another, did not, I believe, arise 
out of a soul at ease. It, with all its questing thought, 
arose out of a soul in trouble, it may be, tormented ; out 
of darkened thought, bitter questioning, intense and 
sympathetic feeling with the suffering and mysteries of 
humanity. 

I do not say that in these tragedies Shakespeare repre- 
sented any personal experiences of his own, or that we can 
trace in any historical circumstances the causes of his 
tragic representation of life. It would be nonsense to say 
that. But I do say that when he wrote these terrible 
dramas, the foundation of his soul was entirely different 
from what it was when he wrote the Merchant of Venice, 
or Twelfth Night, or even Julius Caisar. There had been 
that in his inward being which made his view of human 
life and of its fates dark instead of bright. The subjects 
he took were dreadful with guilt and pain ; his treatment 
of them was unrelenting. His joyousnrss, his play with 



OTHELLO 167 

life, had vanished as if it had never been. His belief in 
a divine Justice is shaken in Hamlet, is almost mocked at 
in Measure for Measure, is really absent in Macbeth, is 
replaced by a belief in Chance as at the root of the 
universe in Othello, and in Lear it is altogether gone. 
He does not quite say that in the play, but it is like a 
creeping mist in it. All the more, because of this, he is 
in a great grief for mankind. He has a deep and personal 
sympathy with the sorrows he records, and this is unmis- 
takable — a hundred passages are steeped in it — but it is 
a sympathy which sees but little light beyond ; and which, 
at least in Othello and Lear, walks in darkness and weeps 
as it walks. 

In the midst of his change, this profound sympathy 
with humanity was unchanged. It had been sym- 
pathy with joy, with love and lovingness, and the sorrow 
of love; with his country's history and fairyland, with 
the movement and clash of outward life in war, in courts, 
in the streets of the city. It was now as close, as vital 
a sympathy with the crimes, the temptations, the in- 
effable sorrows, the deeper passions in the souls of men 
and women. That sympathy was perennial ; in these four 
tragedies it is intense ; its head of waters was always full. 
Like Charity it never fails in them. 

Another thing which lasted from the past was the 
executive power of the artist. We might, perhaps, think 
that a troubled soul would lose the artistic powers — 
conception, construction, representation, imaginative 
creation, execution — that these would at least be con- 
fused or weakened. But that is not the case with an 
imperial genius. Nay, the inward pain of such a man 
stimulates, agonises his powers, drives them to the 
summit of their energy, as Shakespeare was driven 
in these plays. As to the executive power — when a 
great artist has been working for many years, and is 



168 LECTURES ON SHAKESPEARE 

in constant practice, and has improved in capacity every 

month, his executive power works almost of its own 

accord; it would work in hell; and the pangs of hell 

would only make its doing more magnificent. It would 

build without an effort the frenzy of Lear, the agon}' of 

OtheUo. 

This being said, I repeat that Shakespeare was not, in 

these tragedies, the impersonal artist. He chose these 

grim, awful, piteous, and fierce subjects because his 

mood towards humanity was grim with pain; because 

the questioning of mortal doubt and trouble which he 

did represent in Hamlet, had left him without an answer 

to give to the problems of misery and evil. His early 

sense that 

There 's a Divinity which shapes our ends, 
Rough-hew them how we will, 

which lingered still on the lips of Hamlet in Hamlet, 
has vanished away in Lear and in Othello. The noble, 
the good, and the beautiful are there sacrificed without 
any good arising from their sacrifice. Lear makes a vain 
old man's mistake and pays for it by torture and mad- 
ness. Cordelia perishes by a villain's love of cruelty; 
Desdemona dies of her frank innocence; Othello of his 
love and of his foolishness, the blind victim of a 
miscreant. And there is no explanation, no reason why 
such things happen in the world ; nor is there any use, 
any far-off interest in these tears. That, I believe, was 
now the temper of Shakespeare. 

Is that a full account of his temper at this strange 
time ? In o ; it omits Measure for Measure, Troilus and 
Cressida, and Timon of Athens. Where and how shall 
we class these plays ? Well, when a man, like Shake- 
speare in these four tragedies, is in the temper I have 
spoken of — the temper of ' black choler ' — there will come 
intervals when the state of things will seem more than he 



OTHELLO 169 

can bear, when either sorrow for humanity will pass into 
rage with the gods who are indifferent to the pains of 
men, or when his own sympathy with men is changed into 
anger with their villainy, or scorn of their weakness, or 
hatred of their falseness — into contempt of humanity at 
large. This is natural enough and not uncommon. And 
it makes the cynic. It is some such state of the soul 
which underlies Measure for Measure, which deepens into 
scathing scorn in Troilus of human nature, and which is 
black with wrath against all the world in Timon of Athens. 
In these plays Shakespeare's sympathy with humanity 
scarcely exists, and, owing to its loss, his executive power 
as an artist is weaker than it is in the four tragedies. It 
works unevenly, uncertainly. His hand wavers. His 
view of the situations is not inevitably right. 

In natures not nobly built, who have not a solid 
foundation of healthy humanity, to whom cheerfulness 
and joy and love of human nature are not native, such 
cynicism when it comes is cherished, grows, and finally 
masters them. Their genius, if they have had any, is 
ravelled away, and finally dispersed. But in natures that 
are of an opposite character — noble, healthy, joyous, 
loving — such cynicism is transient. It is like a close and 
gloomy cloud- veil which, after violent storm, makes grey 
the landscape, and is silent from the exhaustion of the 
forces which preceded it. It broods, like a curse, over the 
land, and takes all colour out of everything. Then a 
clear wind arises from the west ; the black vapour thins, 
breaks upwards into soft cloud-flakes, sun-smitten into 
tender beauty; and in the quiet sky the evening sun is 
shining with a lovely and delicate light, more lovely and 
delicate than was its radiance in the morning. 

That was the course of the soul of Shakespeare after 
the tempest out of which the tragedies arose. The 
intervals also of cynicism which brought forth Troilus 



170 LECTURES ON SHAKESPEARE 

and Gressida — that strange, mocking, fierce play, with 
so grim and weighty a though tfulness, so sardonic an 
exposure of the baseness of the world's heroes, and so 
savage a contempt of human nature — had passed away. 
So also the terrible denunciations of mankind and the 
gods, which make the Shakespearian work in Timon the 
ideal of searching hatred and scorn of humanity, cease 
their raging. 

With these the cynicism of Shakespeare exhausted 
itself; devoured its own brood. In Coriolanus, in Antony 
and Cleopatra, the wind of a new temper in his soul began 
to blow. Love of human nature, tolerance for its follies, 
even for its guilt, pity for its sorrows, a deep sense of its 
natural nobility, even joy in its beauty, revived; with an 
added dignity, a wiser experience, a solemn sense of the 
permanence of goodness, a balanced temperance in the 
judgment of men, an exquisite mercy — elements which 
had settled themselves now into his soul through his 
conquest of the tempest and the cloud. And then came 
the soft, sweet gentleness, the peaceful happiness, the 
immeasurable kindness of the evening light in his soul 
— the tender twilight of Winters Tale, of Cymbeline, 
and of The Tempest. 

But we are far from that delightful time when we are 
engaged with Othello. There is, it is true, nothing in it 
of the dark grin which peers out from the corners of 
Troilus and Cressida, nothing of the sceva indignatio 
which in Timon rains black damnation on all mankind ; 
but everywhere in it we seem to feel in the writer's soul 
his dark consciousness of the inexplicable aspect of the 
world, of the answerless problem of evil and sorrow ; of 
his doubt, with the dismay that companied it, whether 
there was any intelligent Good-will behind the life of 
man, or whether all that happened was by soulless 
Chance, or by ruthless Fate. Fate dominates Macbeth^ 



OTHELLO 171 

but here in Othello Chance or Unreason, blind and deaf, 
is at the centre of human life. 

That the history of mankind or our personal life should 
be subject to mere Chance, without reason, law, or 
direction, is infinitely less tolerable, and more irritating, 
than that it should be subjected to Fate, whose decrees 
and movements are unalterable, and which, being unalter- 
able, imply reason at their back. We may, in the end, 
bend before Fate, because it moves by Law ; but nothing 
will ever induce us to be otherwise than in angry rebellion 
against unreasoning Chance. We abhor a universe which 
is without any law at all ; and if, for a moment or a year, 
we think we are in such a universe, we despise ourselves 
and our race. That way lies, if it continue, black cynicism 
or insanity. 

Something of such questioning and the temper which 
arises from it seems to have been in Shakespeare's mind 
when he wrote Othello. The conception of the play, the 
movement of it, the events in it, the bringing about of the 
catastrophe, are all apparently in the realm of Chance. 
There is a shocking unreasonableness about them, which is 
all the more curious when we consider that the construc- 
tion of the play, the linking and the sequence of its scenes, 
is so eminently clear, so closely ordered by the imagina- 
tive reason and the logic of passion. This is a wonderful 
combination. 

But I dwell at present on the unreasonableness, the 
chance-strangeness of what occurs. There is a prima facie 
improbability in Desdemona's love for Othello, even if he 
were only a brown Moor, much more if he were intended 
by Shakespeare to be a thick-lipped Negro, as he is called 
in the play by those who hate him. But even as a Moor, 
the strangeness, the unreasonableness of her love is great. 
It is as if Chance were at the back of it. The natural, in- 
deed the rational feeling of the world is against such an 



172 LECTURES ON SHAKESPEARE 

affection. And Shakespeare makes every one in the play, 
except Desdemona, feel how odd it is, how out of the 
natural way of things. No amount of greatness of mind, 
of nobility of character, in Othello can entirely — as some 
think it can — do away with the natural improbability, the 
physical and racial queerness of her love for the Moor. 
And I venture to say that this is the first feeling of those 
who read the play, however they may, in their admiration 
of Othello's noble nature, persuade themselves afterwards 
to the contrary. 

Then there is Iago. It is odd that a young man of 
twenty-eight years should be capable of such cool hypo- 
crisy, unreasonable hatred, such luxuriousness of cruelty ; 
should have such advanced experience of evil, such lip- 
smacking pleasure in plotting it and fulfilling it ; should 
so soon have arrived at the pitilessness of grey-haired 
inhumanity. It is possible, of course, but it is very im- 
probable ; as if a monstrous mind had arrived by chance 
in the body of a non-commissioned officer. It is all the 
more improbable that the reasons of his wickedness cannot 
clearly be discovered by us, nor indeed by himself End- 
less discussion has gathered round the question — ' Why 
did Iago torture Othello ? ' Even when he is proved in 
the play to have done so, no one can quite understand 
why. His wife is lost in surprise. Othello cries — 

demand that demi- devil 
Why he hath thus ensnar'd my soul and body. 

Iago himself cannot tell. Hate is his native air ; the 
desire to torture stings him within. He seeks to explain 
it; he searches for his motives; 'motive-hunting,' Coleridge 
calls it. He finds this and that motive, but not one of 
them explains what is in his heart, not one of them is an 
adequate reason for the devilish pleasure he has in putting 
Othello on the rack, in egging him on to kill Desdemona. 
His suspicion that the Moor was intimate with his wife is 



OTHELLO 173 

an invented suspicion. To give it some colour he accuses 
Cassio of the same sin. His action is outside of probable 
humanity, even of wicked humanity. It is like that of 
a soulless devil in a man, that is, of the last improbability. 
Envy is the most real of his motives, but is in him 
excited to a height almost incredibly beyond its ordinary 
nature. Cassius was envious, so was Casca, but they only 
desired to slay Caasar, not to torture him. All this is the 
more improbable when we find that every one believes 
Iago is especially frank, honest, and open ; that every one, 
and especially his chief victim, trusts him to the bone. 

I intercalate Emilia as another of the improbabili- 
ties. It is surely passing strange that she should have 
lived with Iago for some years, and never thought any ill 
of him, or imagined him capable of deceit. She thinks 
him l wayward.' Wayward ! His wickedness bursts on her 
like a thunderbolt. Till Othello mentions the handker- 
chief, she has not the slightest suspicion of the unhonesty 
or cruelty of the man she has lived with as a wife. 
Of course, he would have deceived the very elect. Still 
it is vastly improbable that she should have thought him 
only wayward, and at times impatient. 

The writer who devised all this was in doubt while 
he wrote that any rational Will, or Justice, or even a 
fixed Destiny, was at the helm of the Universe; but a 
general Unreason which one might call Chance, and 
which made a mere muddle of the course of humanity 
and of our personal lives. 

Then take Othello. When we live with him through the 
first two Acts, we live with the great and experienced 
soldier, with a grave and noble character. He has arrived 
at full middle age, and has won the trust and respect of the 
most j ealous and difficult of governments. All men honour 
his integrity, his skill in war, his ability in governing men, 
his self-governance, his temperate nature, a ruler of men 



174 LECTURES ON SHAKESPEARE 

who rules himself. He has also seen the world and mixed 
with many men and events in an adventurous youth, as 
he relates to Desdemona and to the Signiory of Venice — 
a man then not liable to give his trust rashly, to act on 
mere suspicion, without inquiry, to be ignorant of the evil 
which is in men. Yet this is the vast improbability which 
Shakespeare creates for him — this is the blind, deaf, 
unreasonable chance which happens to him. He places 
his unquestioning trust, to the ignoring of every one else, 
in a young man of twenty-eight, whom, in spite of interest 
made for him, he has put in a lower position than his 
lieutenant, Cassio. It never occurs to him that he may 
have angered Iago. He entrusts his wife to Iago's charge, 
he keeps him always by his side, he consults him in the 
circumstance of the riot; he cashiers Cassio, who has 
fought with him as a faithful comrade, on the report of 
Iago; he listens to his first innuendoes against his wife 
without one symptom of distrust in the man who makes 
them; he believes even in that foul dream which Iago 
invents. He attributes to her, on the mere hearsay 
evidence of Iago, coarse and common lustfulness, re- 
volting appetite. He turns his young wife, in his 
thoughts, into a common harlot ; and his belief in Iago 
is so unshaken that he slays Desdemona. Nothing, 
given Othello's character in the first two Acts, can be 
more improbable. 

Then it is amazingly improbable that a grave, experi- 
enced, world-worn man like Othello, of so magnani- 
mous a nobility of thought and character, should not 
have felt the innocence of Desdemona, should have been 
immediately disturbed into suspicion by Iago's phrase 
1 1 do not like that ' — by his ' Indeed ' — should, in an 
hour, at the hints of a raw young man, be tortured into 
distrust of the woman who had given up all for him, 
broken with her father, violated the customs of her 



OTHELLO 175 

society, and followed him to the war. It is equally 
improbable that he should have made no inquiry concern- 
ing the handkerchief from Emilia, but believed that 
Cassio, having received it from Desdemona, gave it care- 
lessly away to his mistress Bianca. The matter of the 
handkerchief bristles with improbabilities, and Othello — 
this temperate, grave man — never looks into it, drives his 
wife by his violence about it into a lie, and takes his only 
refuge in his hopeless trust in Iago. 

The improbability of the whole affair is shocking. It 
is one more of the mass of improbabilities Shakespeare 
has chosen to rest his play upon. Yet, I repeat, while he 
yielded to a mood which thought men were involved in a 
world of chance, he never ceased to be the artist. There 
was no chance in his work. What he constructed, he 
constructed with the finest imaginative logic. Not a trace 
of want of reason is in the building or conduct of the play. 
The art-powers in him wrought with complete independ- 
ence of the mood of his soul ; as if they were led by a 
separate being in him. He combined all these improba- 
bilities with so creative and formative an imagination that 
the whole play seems eminently probable. We are 
hurried on so fast from the first suspicion of Othello to 
his death that we have no time to ask questions, to doubt 
or debate anything. Our interest is so caught by the 
artist that we resent even a moment's delay. Still, 
Shakespeare made the improbabilities, and they are so 
great that it seems as if at the bottom of his mind he 
believed that a reasonless Chance prevailed in this 
world. 

I turn now to the conduct of the drama. 

It begins with a rush into the main subject. Shake- 
speare mostly starts on his way with a scene or two of 
quiet preparation, but here, as if his dreadful concep- 
tion of the wild passions which were to rage in his 



176 LECTURES ON SHAKESPEARE 

drama had cast their atmosphere back to the beginning 
of its action, his opening scene is full of noise and 
shouting. The silence of the night around Brabantio's 
house is broken into a tempest of anger by the fierce 
summons of Roderigo and Iago to tell him that his 
daughter is gone, and with the Moor. Iago is in full blast, 
brutally gross, shouting the scandal at full voice, piti- 
less of the father, rejoicing in the scandal which will hurt 
Othello. This is the tumultuous opening of the tragedy, 
and it suggests, mixed up as it is with the ill-fated 
marriage, the storm-swept atmosphere of human passion 
in which we are to live from the second Act until the end. 

The streets of Venice now affront the quiet night with 
noise. Brabantio and his clan are out seeking Desde- 
mona. In another street Othello with attendants and 
torches goes to meet Brabantio and out- tongue his com- 
plaint. Cassio with a troop meets Othello to summon 
him to the Senate. On them comes, full of fury, 
Brabantio and his men with swords drawn, to accuse 
Othello of practising on Desdemona with drugs. It is a 
melee of passion and noise, and is again an outward pro- 
logue to the inward and dreadful turmoil in the soul of 
Othello and the spirit of Desdemona. In the whole scene 
Othello, as if in contrast, is calm and dignified, the master 
of the disturbance, and it is piteous to think of him, as 
he is a few days later, racked and torn with misery, 
all his quiet lost, all his dignity departed. 

In the next scene, in the council chamber, when 
Brabantio accuses Othello, and the Senate send him to 
Cyprus, he still preserves his noble quietude, his soldier 
bearing, the frankness of his nature. His defence is full 
of self-confidence, and yet there is in it a curious sim- 
plicity as if a child in a man was speaking ; as if, loving 
Desdemona so well, something of Desdemona's spirit had 
lodged itself in him. Again, we think of what this 



OTHELLO 177 

stately, quiet man will soon become, and the contrast 

shakes our soul. 

And here for the first time we meet Desdemona, and 

she is a surprise. We expect to find her, like her father's 

description of her, 

A maiden never bold ; 
Of spirit so still and quiet that her motion 
Blushed at herself ; 

and we find no such person. 1 No one is more surprised 
than Brabantio by her dignity, her firm grasp of the 
situation, her unshrinking attitude before the Senate ; 
not one at all of spirit so still and quiet that her motion 
blushed at herself. All these years he has never known 
her, no more than Lear has known his daughters. Love 
has not transformed her, but brought to the surface the 
deep powers of her nature — strength of loving, strength 
of will, firmness in act, clear vision of what to do in 
difficulty as when she settles the question before the 
whole Senate of what she is to do when Othello leaves 
for Cyprus. She is frank and bold and firm ; not a girl, 
but a steadfast, clear-eyed woman. But in her bold- 
ness there is no immodesty. It is the boldness of 
deep love. It is the boldness of innocence. It is the 
boldness of one who is ignorant of the wrong and 
wickedness of the world, and this innocent boldness in 
her character accounts for the pleasant frankness of her 
conversation with Iago in the next Act, and for her 
natural relations with Cassio, and alas, for the ease with 
which she slips into the net of Iago. With what pity 
then we read, with what foreboding, Othello's trustful 

words — 

My life upon her faith ! Honest Iago, 
My Desdemona must I leave to thee. 

1 This description has been foolishly taken by many great actresses 
as the basis of their presentment of Desdemona. It is Brabantio's idea of 
her, not Shakespeare's. 

M 



178 LECTURES ON SHAKESPEARE 

We are now left with Iago and his gull Roderigo, 
who is in love with Desdemona. We have seen Iago 
shouting coarse insult in the streets of Venice to bring 
injury on Othello. At the bottom of him is a natural 
brutality, a pleasure in gross lust and soulless cruelty. 
His talk smells of the barrack and the brothel. He 
maddens Othello with the grossest pictures of his wife 
and Cassio. He has not one shred of belief in faith- 
fulness, chastity, or purity. There is no goodness — is 
the only truth of which he is certain. 

Roderigo, seeing Othello and Desdemona, thinks his 
love hopeless, and will drown himself. Iago laughs him 
to scorn. Desdemona will soon tire of the Moor, and 
seek for other flesh ; Othello will also change, and then 
you shall be happy. Lust is master. 'Think first of 
yourself, and then of love. I'll drive Othello and 
Desdemona apart; I'll help you; I hate Othello. Put 
money in your purse. Virtue ? Virtue is the getting of 
one's own way.' 

There we are alone with Iago. Shakespeare is fond of 
soliloquies, and this self-communing, in which Iago bares 
his soul, is a habit with him. He plays before others 
so hypocritical a part, with such intense a falseness, that 
it is a great relief to be true in solitary speech, and to 
chuckle over his own cleverness in lying. And here he 
smiles as he engenders his plot to make the Moor jealous 
of Cassio and Desdemona, to get Cassio's place, and to feed 
fat his envious hatred of Othello. Thus ends the first 
Act, and the foundation of the whole tragedy is closely 
knit together in it. It could not be better conducted, nor 
with a firmer and a more experienced hand. All the 
characters are drawn not only in the clearest outline, but 
the outline is filled up with a multitude of subtle touches 
like those of a great painter; nor can the politic and 
human character of a great council, such as the Senate of 



OTHELLO 179 

Venice, be better indicated than Shakespeare has done 
it here. 

The second Act, in which Iago arranges and outspreads 
the events which will enable him to make safe and 
probable his attack on Othello, is full of business, hustle 
and noise, and in a general turmoil all the personages 
are brought on the stage. The only steady thing is 
Iago's supremacy as maker of the riot. Othello, how- 
ever, when he comes on the stage, is still pre-eminent, 
quiet, self-contained, and determined. It is the last 
time we see him as the master of men. In a short day, 
his peace has gone for ever ; he can no longer rule men, 
he has lost all power to rule himself. He has been like 
an impregnable tower, four-square against all the winds ; 
he is henceforth like the same tower breached, ruined, 
and all the stately rooms within destroyed. 

The storm-atmosphere of the first Act is thus carried 
by the riot into the second Act. The impression of a 
great tragedy to come falls like a shadow on the soul, 
and when we listen to Iago at the end of the Act — alone 
and darkly talking to himself — we know what dreadful 
sorrow is in the wind, and what infernal will will make 
and direct the storm. To harmonise with this human 
tumult, Shakespeare begins this Act with a great storm 
at sea. All the way from Venice, down the chafing 
Adriatic, Othello's fleet has been molested by the gale, 
and the Turkish fleet destroyed. He and Desdemona 
land on the island of their misfortune in a tempest 
when — 

The wind- staked surge, with high and monstrous mane, 
Seems to east water on the burning Bear, 
And quench the guards of the ever-fixed Pole. 

Nor is the end of the Act left without words which seem 
to insist from without on this sense of wild disturbance 



180 LECTURES ON SHAKESPEARE 

in the atmosphere of the play. When Othello comes in 
to subdue the quarrel, the great bell of the town has 
begun to ring. 

Who 's that that rings the bell % 
The town will rise. 

Silence that dreadful bell : it frights the isle 
From her propriety. 

I cannot tell why these words have always seemed, to my 

ear, to be charged with a picture of a town waking to 

wild riot, and to a tempest in the sky bearing fire from 

street to street. It thickens the tempestuous atmosphere 

I speak of. It recalls Iago's pleasure when he bids 

Roderigo shout his dishonour to Brabantio. 'Cry,' he 

says, 

' Cry, with like timorous accent and dire yell 
As when, by night and negligence, the fire 
Is spied in populous cities.' 

And now the third Act opens, and all this outward 
storm in nature, and in the riot and quarrels of men, 
becomes inward in the soul of Othello. There, in his 
tortured spirit, the tempest rises, grows and deepens, 
rages fiercer and more fierce, agony on agony, till it breaks 
into murder and dies of its misery. And the spiritual 
tempest is more terrible than the natural, as that in the 
spirit of Lear is greater than the hurricane. 

I say no more on the conduct of the play. 1 I turn to 
the main characters as I think they were conceived by 
Shakespeare. 

1 I should like to draw attention to the mise en scene at the beginning 
of the second Act. Shakespeare's stage was naked of scenery. But the 
dialogue makes the scene spectacular. We see the town in the back- 
ground, and the cliffs outside lined with the people looking for the ships. 
Below is the tempestuous sea, and the great waves roaring. A group of 
gentlemen talk in the foreground, and in their talk we see Cassio's ship 
arrive, then Iago's, then Othello's. Cries of 'A sail ! a sail ! ' guns going 
off, a trumpet sounding, announce these arrivals. Nothing is seen, but 
the dialogue paints all, as in a cinematograph. 



OTHELLO 181 

With the exception of Hamlet, no characters in 
Shakespeare's plays have been subjected to so much 
analysis, discussion, and theories as Othello, Iago, and 
Desdemona. In no play are there two such leading and 
tremendous parts, each challenging the actor's utmost 
study, as those of Othello and Iago. The most famous 
actors have chosen to act both parts, as if they were 
equally worthy of the best efforts of their genius. What 
each of these characters say from point to point, the 
meaning of each phrase, how it came to be said, how it is 
to be acted, with what intention, with what gestures, have 
been studied, varied, criticised, opposed and defended for 
nearly three hundred years. 

That means that the characters are not only exceed- 
ingly complex underneath their boldly drawn outline, 
but also that Shakespeare's multitudinous thoughts about 
them, as he wrote and attempted to express each of those 
thoughts, even if it were only in an interjected phrase, 
have made them even more complex to us than he 
originally intended them to be. At this time of his 
life, when he was burdened with incommunicable, 
unresolvable thinking concerning God and man, his 
writing was so charged with passion, meditation, and 
the matter of humanity, that it often became obscure, not 
so much in its expression, as in its intention and its goal. 
Men have never yet satisfied themselves with regard to 
what he meant Othello, Iago, and Desdemona to be. 

There are those who say that one cannot understand 
Desdemona or Othello till Iago is understood ; that Iago's 
native wickedness lies at the root of the play. It is a 
probable supposition and arguable. But I think, with 
natural diffidence, that Shakespeare's idea was not that. 
The deepest source of all the woes and guilt of the play 
lay in Desdemona's extraordinary innocence of the world, 
and the sin of the world. It is on seeing that innocence, 



182 LECTURES ON SHAKESPEARE 

and by play upon it, that Iago conceives and carries out 
his plot. It is plain, in spite of his blasting hints of 
Desdemona's unchaste nature to Roderigo, to Cassio and 
Othello, that he knows she is innocent. Yet what would 
Venetian society have said had it heard her say to Cassio — 

If I do vow a friendship, I '11 perform it 

To the last article : rny lord shall never rest ; 

I '11 watch him tame and talk him out of patience ; 

His bed shall seem a school, his board a shrift ; 

I '11 intermingle everything he does 

With Cassio's suit : therefore, be merry, Cassio ; 

For thy solicitor shall rather die 

Than give thy cause away. 

We feel her innocence in every word, but Othello, with 
Iago beside him, would not feel it ; and her persistence in 
her friendship kills her. She takes Cassio's defence so 
eagerly that she maddens her husband ; and does this 
twice at the most unlucky times, even at the hour of her 
death. It is owing to her innocence that Iago makes her 
his easy tool. It is owing to it she thinks of every explana- 
tion of Othello's fury except the right one ; that she is 
quite ignorant of jealousy, and cannot, when it is suggested, 
conceive it in Othello. It is owing to this that she 
has that frank, unquestioning trust in Iago, in Cassio, in 
Emilia, in Othello, which leads her straight to death. Her 
innocence is her bane. It is owing to it that Othello — who 
does not understand innocence and has evidently never 
met it — suspects her so easily. It is owing to that ignor- 
ance of the world which £oes with innocence that she half- 
woos Othello, and bids him speak to her, which afterwards 
comes up against her. It is owing to this that she aban- 
dons her home when she loves, forgets her father's love, and 
marries a Moor against all the traditions of her society — 
every one of which actions are used by that villain to 
defame her in the eyes of Othello. Is such innocence 
believable? — that is Iago's argument to Roderigo, to 



OTHELLO 183 

Othello. The dames of Venice are not like that. 'In 
Venice,' says Iago, ' they do let heaven see the pranks,' 

They dare not show their husbands ; their best conscience 
Is not to leave 't undone, but keep 5 t unknown. 

Desdemona is not like these Venetians, and it is her 
destruction. The only man in the whole play who sees 
her as she truly is is Cassio; and he is the man with 
whom she is supposed to be false to Othello. 

0, what was Shakespeare thinking of the world when he 
invented this, and laid it all upon one innocent head ? Is 
this the result and the fate of innocence ? Alas ! too great 
innocence in a woman is a most dangerous factor in a 
society which is not innocent, or, not being guilty, is well 
acquainted with guilt. Desdemona's innocence, quite un- 
consciously, ruined the lives of men. Her path was strewn 
with the dead. A little knowledge on her part of the 
world ; a little knowledge of the passions of men, of the 
impurity of men and women, of hatred and jealousy, a 
little common sense such as comes of handling daily life 
in the world, would have dissolved Iago's villainy, saved 
her own life and saved Othello. 0, I say again, what 
was Shakespeare thinking of the course of things when he 
made this representation ? With what an infinite piteous- 
ness he has clothed it; and yet how deeply, combined 
with the stupidity of Othello, it irritates the reader, how 
deeply the injustice of the situation irritated Shakespeare 
— for part of the irritation we feel is the irritation in his 
soul with a world of mere chance transferred to us. Yet 
who has not felt the loveliness of Desdemona's unconscious 
innocence ? In scene after scene, with Cassio, Iago, 
Othello, Emilia, in a great variety of circumstance, it is 
bright and clear as sunshine. It goes easily with the 
frank boldness on which I have dwelt. I sometimes 
think that her pleading for Cassio is overdone, that we 
might have less of it, but nevertheless the presentation 



184 LECTURES ON SHAKESPEARE 

of Desdemona as she passes through the unveiling to her 
of wickedness and sorrow and passion to her death, is of 
an unearthly beauty. To the end she is whiter than 
the driven snow. The last scene with Emilia is pathetic 
beyond words. Innocent she loved and lived, and 
innocent she died. In a world of Chance she died. 

To turn from her to Iago is to turn from light to dark- 
ness. Shakespeare has given to his character infinite 
care, minute artistry. Its variety, within its low range, 
is almost incalculable. Every sentence adds a new touch, 
a new complexity, a new thought to it. Yet, it seems 
simple enough as we read the play, so great is the art 
which represents it. 

Iago is raised by some writers into the representation 
of almost absolute evil : a Satan incarnate, with a majesty 
of evil surrounding him, of which I think Shakespeare 
had no notion at all. He is again represented as a great 
artist of evil, who is enthralled with the pleasure of his 
own artistry in wickedness. He is also called a silent 
poet, who works out the dreadful tragedy of which he is 
the cause with all the joy of a great dramatist. 

I think these views are strangely exaggerated, and that 
Shakespeare would not accept them. There is no majesty 
in Iago. He is a low and cunning beast. Nor is his 
intellect of a high character ; it is keen and subtle, partly 
of the fox, partly of the snake, but there is nothing great 
about it. It enables him to disguise his real nature, to 
wear the mask of the honest man, of the bluff, open- 
speaking soldier; but that kind of cleverness is not 
uncommon, and needs no special intelligence. 

Views of him, such as I have mentioned, arise partly 
from seeing Iago against the background of the white 
innocence of Desdemona, and the noble simplicity of 
Othello. When Iago is near Desdemona he looks blacker 



OTHELLO 185 

than helL If Othello had not been so simple, so stupid, 
so devoid of any intuitive sense that he trusts Iago and 
distrusts his wife, Iago would not have seemed so intelli- 
gent. But he is always in contrast with good people, or 
with fools like Roderigo. 

He does not deceive Roderigo. He is his own gross 
wicked self with him ; but then he holds Roderigo in the 
hollow of his hand, because of his dishonest love of 
Desdemona. He stimulates that love, and the more he 
stimulates it the more does Roderigo become his gull, 
his slave; and the more frankly does Iago revel in his 
natural wickedness, and boast of it with pleasure. It is 
quite an agreeable exercise to speak of himself as he is, 
without his mask, to a comrade, and at the same time to 
rob and make a tool of this comrade. This additional 
betrayal is nuts to Iago. There is no special cleverness in 
his treatment of Roderigo. A fox can easily outwit a 
rabbit. Had Iago met ordinarily intelligent folk, he 
would have been found out in a day ; and once or twice 
Shakespeare suggests that view of him. His plot against 
Othello and Desdemona is founded on their noble nature, 
and is skilfully worked out, but it is a plot of low 
cunning, not of fine intelligence. Othello had no defence 
against it, because he was entirely incapable of conceiving 
or understanding an} T thing so ignoble. Fortune supplied 
Iago with trustful folk to work on — on Desdemona, 
ignorant of evil, and Othello, dull of intelligence while 
noble of character. 

Again, Iago's plot was not so intelligently constructed 
but that the slightest chance would have undone the 
whole tangle of it, and it is undone at the end by his not 
having been sufficiently clever to guard against Emilia's 
knowledge of his possession of the handkerchief. He 
ought to have stolen it unknown to her. On the whole, 
the notion that Shakespeare meant Iago to be an imperial 



186 LECTURES ON SHAKESPEARE 

force of evil, a monarch of the pit, an embodiment of 
masterly intelligence subtle and powerful to destroy, or 
an artist in evil, is not in the play. Not intellectual 
power then, but the power of base cunning in a greedy 
nature, was of the essence of the man. 

But the very centre of Iago is that self-love which is 
the excluder of all other love, and therefore absolute evil. 
Himself alone is Iago's universe. ' I never found man ' 
(till he found himself) ' that knew how to love himself.' 

Of course, then, since the absence of love is the 
absence of all goodness, everything he does and thinks 
is evil; and when he sees innocence or goodness, he 
hates them, blackens them, and desires to injure them. 
( Virtue ! a fig ! ' he cries. ' Love is merely a lust of the 
blood and a permission of the will.' To him self-sacrifice 
is sin, all true love and goodness unbelievable. He is 
sure that Cassio is false to Othello, and that Desdemona 
and Othello will soon seek for fresh blood when they are 
satiated with one another. The only other character in 
Shakespeare who cannot love, but is for himself alone, is 
Richard in., and he is less evil than Iago, for his conscience 
awakens when he is asleep. No touch of conscience 
ever disturbs Iago. Where there is no love there is 
no conscience. 

Combined with this is sensuality ; not sensuality united 
to love, or somewhat spiritualised by imagination, but the 
common appetite of the brute intensified by the memory, 
the intelligence, and the experience of the man. Only 
one thing in Iago is stronger than sensuality. It is his 
will to live for his own success, for his greed, for the 
satisfaction of his envy and his hate. For the sake of 
quenching these thirsts, sensual appetite is mastered ; 
and he enlarges on this to Roderigo. But it is vital in 
Iago, as vital as men say it is in the goat and the monkey, 
as this vile brute tells Othello it is in Desdemona. To 



OTHELLO 187 

her, to Cassio, to Othello, to his wife, to all the dames 
of Venice, he imputes this appetite as their conqueror. 
What they call love is bodily lust, and that only. He has 
used women, but never loved them. His conversation, his 
soliloquies, are full of hateful phrases, images, innuendoes, 
gross and abominable. He is a dirty dog, and his vile 
ability leaves him still indescribably vulgar. How two 
noble creatures like Othello and Desdemona did not feel 
a natural repulsion from him I cannot understand. But 
there is no trace of even an unconscious antagonism to 
him. Their high and noble soul cannot imagine Iago. 
They hold him to be 'honest Iago' till the very end. 
This is another, however, of the strange improbabilities of 
the play. 

Again, the sister of sensuality is cruelty. The lust of 
the one induces the lust of the other. The exercise of 
cruelty produces the same thrill of the nerves and senses 
as the exercise of the other. Iago may not have been 
cruel in the past, but when he begins to carry out his plot 
and feels that he has his victims helpless in his hands, 
cruelty born of his sensual nature awakes in him, and 
when he has once begun to be cruel, he has an increasing 
pleasure in it. He loves it for its own sake. He is not 
satisfied with making Othello jealous ; he turns his weapon 
in every wound he makes, he puts irritant poison on the 
blade. His words are chosen to torture, and to vary the 
torture. His appetite for cruelty grows by what it feeds 
on. I do not think when he began to make Othello 
jealous that he desired to bring him to the murder of 
Desdemona, but his cruelty, becoming more luscious by 
habit, grows into that, and he urges his victim into that 
ultimate misery. Once he has tasted blood, he thirsts 
for more and more of it insatiably. He is always the 
brute, at the root of him : the hyena, with the brains of 
a loveless man. 



188 LECTURES ON SHAKESPEARE 

This is Iago in himself. Outwardly, he is incarnate 
envy. Such a nature when thrown into the movement 
of men is certain to be envious of all who are more for- 
tunate or better than himself. Envy is raised to its 
highest power in Iago. In other men it is modified by 
some forms of love, but Iago is incapable of loving, and 
because of that his envy has no check, no bounds. It 
makes him feel himself the enemy of all his world, and 
he knows the danger of this position. Therefore he puts 
on the mask of one who is the very opposite of that 
which he knows he is — the honest, bluff soldier who is 
the friend of all. His keen cunning enables him to 
succeed in this, and he plumes himself on his knavery 
and its inventiveness. He utterly despises all the crowd 
he has to do with, fools whom he can play with as he 
pleases — Othello, Cassio, Roderigo. ' Who are they,' he 
says, ' to stand in my way ? 1 11 drag them down till my 
envy is satisfied. I can outplot them, 1 11 wring out of 
them all my greed desires.' His envy has been general, 
but when the play begins it has become particular. An 
incident has given it a particular direction, and awakes it 
into fury against a set of persons who have injured his 
self-love. Othello has passed him over in favour of 
Cassio, and instantly his natural envy leaps into tenfold 
energy. When an evil passion sees its prey, it concen- 
trates itself into deadly action. ' I have 't,' cries Iago, 

It is engender' d. Hell and night 
Must bring this monstrous birth to the world's light. 

Then, next in order, hatred is born of envy, and hatred 
calls to her side all the keen cunning of Iago's brain to 
weave pain and shame, torture and death for those he 
hates. Envy, greed, and hatred, lashed together like 
hounds, Iago lets loose upon Cassio and Othello, and on 
Desdemona. 

This is born in his brain before the play opens. It 



OTHELLO 189 

gives its fury to the shouts with which he betrays Othello 
to Brabantio. It fills all his reasoning with Roderigo. 
* I hate the Moor, 1 he cries. It is developed into the full 
means of his treacherous plot in his soliloquy. And his 
hatred never relaxes till his end is reached. He reaches 
that end, but he overreaches himself. He holds all those 
he hates in supreme contempt. In that contempt he 
breaks down. There is no one whom he despises more 
than Emilia, and Emilia causes the discovery of his 
villainy. In his rage he slays her, and passes unrepent- 
ant to his death. There are plenty of Iagos in the world, 
but there are not many, fortunately, who combine with a 
foul and loveless nature a base but keen intellect. It is 
a deadly combination, and when it is driven by the love 
of power, by greed, by envy, and by hate, Iago is 
discovered. 

Othello, when the play begins, is a great partisan, one 
of those leaders of soldiery whom cities like Venice or 
Florence employed in their service, faithful, even to 
death, to the state that employs him, and of so high and 
magnanimous a nature that Iago hates him as naturally 
as Cassio and Desdemona love him. There were noble 
Moors of this type, as the history of Spain proves — men 
of romantic honour and dignity. Calm in battle and riot, 
aware of his power to master them, he is self-confident 
from long management of men and wars. At the same 
time he is curiously simple, even childlike, as his speech 
to the Senate displays him, when he opens his heart to 
the wondering senators. A stately, noble, self-contained, 
quiet figure ! It is of the very essence of the tragedy 
that, when a few days have passed, this dignified image 
of the man is miserably reversed. Othello has lost all 
dignity, all quietude, all self-command, all power to see 
clearly, all simplicity; and the happy child in him is 



190 LECTURES ON SHAKESPEARE 

replaced by dark suspicion of his innocent wife passing 
swiftly into her brutal murder. The contrast is terrible 
and heartrending to the audience, who, listening, know 
the truth. 

What has happened ? On this grave, mature man, in 
full middle age, who has probably never known an inno- 
cent or well-bred woman in his incessant warring, falls the 
dreadful misfortune of a young girl's love, and of one who 
is of a different race and colour, so that her love seems to 
him from the beginning a little strange, as it does, he 
knows, to every one else. He has never quite understood 
why she loved him. He feels in contact with her his 
colour and his race, and his soul is forced to feel this by 
the accusation of Brabantio that he must have practised 
by drugs on Desdemona, otherwise she could not have 
loved him. Strange reasonings would beset him from 
time to time, and he is prepared to receive the insinuations 
of Iago. This explains and partly excuses the quickness 
with which he receives them. Moreover, he is all of a 
tremble, ever}? - string of his heart is over- tense with the 
advent of love. Love, when it comes, charged with all its 
witcheries, on a sensitive and imaginative man who has 
long past his youth, upturns the whole nature of such 
a man, throws every element in his character into new 
positions, new relations to life, is like a despotism in a 
soul which has been free. If his path of life be smooth, 
such a disturbance settles down into a peaceful rearrange- 
ment. But if any bitter circumstance then touch the 
agitated soul, if any doubt of the truth or love of the 
woman arise, if jealousy, above all, enter its house, the 
man will suffer torture; the waters of the great deep 
within will overflow, and every wave will be fire of 
sulphur ; his intelligence will tremble on its throne ; his 
moral nature will lose its power to command or act ; his 
insight will be blinded ; every suspicion will agonise him 



OTHELLO 191 

into a passion for certainty ; his sense of honour will 
dissolve into baseness ; his courtesy, all social conventions 
of gentleness and good breeding, will be flung to the 
winds ; his love will not perish, but it will add so much 
bitterness to his hatred that it will seem to be an incred- 
ible hatred ; the whole world will be black as night, and 
against that blackness he will see Cassio and Desdemona 
in the red light of murder, while every nerve in his body 
will tremble with a maddening intensit}'. He will fly into 
furies of act and speech; strike Desdemona before the 
nobles of Venice, call her devil, curse her. 
Damn her, lewd minx, 0, damn her. 

He will fall into trances of miserable thought ; the ancient 
brute in man will spring into life, and issue in foulness of 
thought, hunger for revenge and murder. It is a hopeless 
degradation. Jealousy is a hell, and its victims writhe 
and curse in its waves of flame. This was Othello's fate, 
as it has been the fate of a thousand thousand other 
men and women. It is a piteous sight, and if we had not 
followed Iago's infernal work on him, it would awaken some 
contempt in the pity. For Othello has lost his intelli- 
gence. He is stupid with pain. The slightest inquiry, 
the exercise of common judgment, the smallest thought, 
would have, in a moment, undone Iago's net. We are so 
angry with his stupidity, that when Emilia calls him at 
the end — 

gull, dolt ! As ignorant as dirt. thou dull Moor ! 

we are grateful for the truth in spite of all our pity. 
There are those who suggest — to save the noble nature 
of the man — that he was not the victim of what they 
call vulgar jealousy. But he was in Shakespeare's mind, 
and Iago's stories and hints would have made a saint who 
believed them jealous. Othello is lashed into the extremity 
of jealousy. For it is not only rage that Desdemona's 



192 LECTURES ON SHAKESPEARE 

love and thought should be given to Cassio, but fury 
that her body should be his ; and this stings and maddens 
him more than the other. Again, again, again Shake- 
speare marks that into clearness, and Iago whips that 
element in jealousy into fierceness. But both forms of 
jealousy are in Othello, and when both mix together 
jealousy reaches its extremity. The man is not mad, but 
he is running at full speed, with disordered hair and torn 
clothes and flaming eyes, on the waving line which divides 
sanity from insanity. It is a border-land where every 
breath is torment, and Othello was wild and whirling in it. 

The root of jealousy is selfishness — self-love which 
believes itself to be love ; which claims all for itself alone. 
' All that I love is mine and only mine. Her body and 
soul are mine. Her kisses are mine, her thoughts are 
mine. No one shall share the one or engage the other. 
I claim all, and if she give her love away to another, I '11 
defend my own tooth and nail and make her suffer the 
pain I suffer. " I '11 tear her all to pieces," cries Othello. 
" 1 11 chop her into messes ! " I '11 strike her dead. Then 
if we ask why, the jealous wretch answers: " Because I 
love. It is love which drives me on." ' 

It is not love, but self-love. Nay, it is the reversal of 
love. With that reversal of the essence of all goodness, 
all other goodness is reversed, for the time, in Othello. 
His faith changes into suspicion and distrust, his love into 
hatred. His intelligence becomes stupidity, his stately 
quiet the blind fury which strikes his wife ; his free and 
noble nature the slave of an ignoble passion, his gentle 
courtesy savage cruelty, his dignity indecent coarseness, 
his balanced judgment blind revenge. All is reversal. 
What he was is lost, is no more. Iago knows it — x 

1 A few phrases, such as this, of imaginative quality, or of apparent 
pity, are given to Iago by Shakespeare. They are out of Iago's character, 
but they are eminently effective on the stage, and Shakespeare wanted 
that. 



OTHELLO 193 

Not poppy, nor mandragora, 
Nor all the drowsy syrups of the world, 
Shall ever medicine thee to that sweet sleep 
Which thou owedst yesterday. 

Othello feels he is no more Othello, and the vast misery 
of that breaks into that piteous farewell to all that he 
has been — I wish it were less rhetorical: 

0, now for ever 
Farewell the tranquil mind ! farewell content ! 
Farewell the plumed troop and the big wars 
That make ambition virtue ! 0, farewell. 
Farewell the neighing steed and the shrill trump, 
The spirit-stirring drum, the ear-piercing fife, 
The royal banner and all quality, 
Pride, pomp and circumstance of glorious war ! 
Farewell ! Othello's occupation 's gone. 

The great soldier is no more. 

And now, yet more unhappy, the great lover is no 
more. Othello bids farewell to love. Welcome, in place 
of love, revenge and hate; and the dreadful passion 
in his unhappy soul lifts his words into verse which 
sounds like the rolling sea. Iago thinks he may change 
his bloody purpose : 

Never, Iago. Like to the Pontic sea, 
Whose icy current and compulsive course 
Ne'er feels retiring ebb, but keeps due on 
To the Propontic and the Hellespont ; 
Even so my bloody thoughts, with violent pace, 
Shall ne'er look back, ne'er ebb to humble love 
Till that a capable and wide revenge 
Swallow them up. 

The happy lover is dead. 

Yet, now and then, even in the furious fire, he remembers 
how he loved, and love rushes into him, and, with love, an 
infinite pity for himself. This is a common characteristic 
of jealousy at its height, and Shakespeare does not forget 
it. Othello recalls how he had lain beside her. 

I found not Cassio's kisses on her lips, 

N 



194 LECTURES ON SHAKESPEARE 

he cries in an utter misery of love. And then again, in 
the very midst of his rage, 

O, the world hath not a sweeter creature : she might lie by an 
emperor's side and command him tasks. 

Iago. Nay, that 's not your way. 

Oth. Hang her ! I do but say what she is : so delicate -with her 
needle : an admirable musician : 0, she will sing the savageness out 
of a bear : of so high and plenteous wit and invention : — 

Iago. She 's the worst for all this. 

Oth. 0, a thousand, thousand times : and then, of so gentle a 
condition ! 

Iago. Ay, too gentle. 

Oth. Nay, that 's certain : but yet the pity of it, Iago ! 
Iago, the pity of it, Iago ! 

It is pity for her ; pity full of recollected love. But for 
us who listen, it is pity for the situation, pity for both, but 
our greater pity is for Othello. Then, finally, in that last 
scene before he slays Desdemona, there is an unspeak- 
able tenderness below every word of Othello's soliloquy. 
He is no longer furious ; he is deadly quiet ; and he is 
quiet because, after long tossing to and fro in doubt, he is 
resolved to kill. In that fixed resolve jealousy is for the 
moment half-asleep, and he lets his memory slip back 
into praise of her perfection and into pity for her fate. 
These two interchange their passions from verse to verse, 
but in both his heart is overflowing with love. 

It is in this strangely mingled temper that he attempts 
to prove that his killing of her is a sacrifice, a judicial act, 
the execution of a weak and wicked woman, who must die 
lest she should betray more men ; and there are critics 
who take this view in order to save the noble nature of 
the man, even when he blindly murders Desdemona in 
order to prove that he was not the victim of what they 
call vulgar jealousy. He had been noble, but for the last 
two Acts he had been ignoble, with fleeting moments of 
nobility. And here, in this majestical soliloquy, there are, 
like bursts of sunshine in a black sky, passages of the 



OTHELLO 195 

ancient nobleness in Othello. But it does not last. Under- 
neath the real cause why he blots his wife out of the 
world, his unintelligent, coarse, revengeful, cruel jealousy 
lies like a tigress, and leaps at a touch into brutal fury. 
The notion of a grave justice to be done on her is evapor- 
ated in the heat of his personal rage. He has mentioned 
Cassio in his accusation. Desdemona replies so that it 
seems she is sorry for Cassio. This maddens the jealous 
man. 

Oth. Out, strumpet ! weep'st thou for him to my face. 

Des. 0, banish me, my lord, but kill me not ! 

Oth. Down, strumpet ! 

Des. Kill me to-morrow ; let me live to-night ! 

Oth. Nay, if you strive, — 

Des. But half an hour ! 

Oth. Being done, there is no pause. 

Des. But while I say one prayer ! 

Oth. It is too late. [He stifles her. 

There's no sacrifice offered up to honour in that, no 
judicial calm. It is jealousy that slays, jealousy which 
has conquered the infinite sorrow, love, and pity which has 
filled his soul before the deed, and made us half believe 
that jealousy was dead. We know the rest, when, the mad- 
ness over, he is himself again, again the noble creature he 
was of old. He judges himself, and his sword dissolves 
the inexplicable chance in which the blundering universe 
has entangled him. 

I kiss'd thee ere I killed thee — no way but this ; 
Killing myself, to die upon a kiss. 

Deep pity is left with us for the ill-fortuned whose 
suffering was unreasonable, whose death was a mistake. 
Our pity is so great, it rises into love. And the more we 
pity and love, the more deeply do we realise how dark, 
grim, and inexplicable seemed now to Shakespeare the 
cruel irony of life. He does not complain of it himself, 
but he writes down with unrelenting realism one example 



196 LECTURES ON SHAKESPEARE 

of things as they are, if haply he may purge his spirit of 
the black choler which possesses it. It is no use to say 
that he writes only as an artist, with a cool temper. He 
writes in a passion of pity for men, in a passion of resent- 
ment for their pain. His soul was dark with tempest, 
and the tempest deepens in King Lear. 



VII 

KING LEAR 

There is a faint, a pathetic touch of association between 
T%velfth Night and King Lear. The Fool, in the midst of 
the storm, sings a verse of the same song with which the 
Clown closes that comedy — and the verse fits the pitiless 
night, and the madness and sorrow of Lear. 

He that has, and a little tiny wit, — 
With hey, ho, the wind and the rain, — 

Must make content with his fortunes fit ; 
Though the rain it raineth every day. 

I wonder if Shakespeare, when he wrote that into King 
Lear, thought of the last time he had used the song, and 
of the temper half-jovial, half-romantic, in the atmosphere 
of which he wrote Twelfth Night. We, when we read it, 
cannot help thinking of the contrast between the spirit 
of the two plays. Yet there are only about four years 
between them. King Lear was composed in 1605 or 1606, 
and is known to have been acted before King James at 
Whitehall on December 26, 1606. Twelfth Night was 
acted in 1601-2. 

What Shakespeare passed through, within his soul, 
in those four or five years we cannot tell. It led him 
through Hamlet, Troilus and Gressida, Othello, Measure 
for Measure and Macbeth. It brought him now to King 
Lear and Timon of Athens. It was a terrible journey, 
and the goal at which he arrived was even more terrible 
than the journey. There is no drama in the whole range 
of modern literature, perhaps of ancient, which can equal 

197 



198 LECTURES ON SHAKESPEARE 

King Lear in the tragic imagination which has there 
clothed with chaotic darkness and godless sorrow not only 
Lear and all the characters that make his mighty pains, 
but also the whole of humanity, even the gods them- 
selves. The eternal Justice which, we trust, lives beyond 
and above our sorrow and our crime; which the Greek 
Drama permits us to feel as holding in its hands a far-off 
hope — is not to be found in King Lear. Its outlook over 
the world that was, and is, and shall be, is of blackness 
and darkness for ever. The gods have not only forgotten 
man ; the gods seem dead. The stars alone — the destroy- 
ing planets who hate the human race — rule the world. 
And the loveliness of Cordelia's love, and the loyal truth 
of Kent, and the tenderness of the Fool, and the pity of 
Lear's madness, while they redeem human nature from 
the horror of Regan and Edmund, Goneril and Cornwall, 
only deepen the dreadful aspect of the world, for they 
suffer for their goodness more than these vulture-men 
and women for their crimes. The world of King Lear 
is a world from which all the conceptions which create a 
just God are expunged. In it also Nature herself is as 
blind, as pain-stricken, as helpless, as left to herself as 
Lear ; and if she is not blind, she is as wicked, as pitiless 
as Goneril and Regan. 

What brought Shakespeare to this dread ? How came 
it to pass that, like Dante, he went down into Hell, and 
with, it seems, even more personal suffering than Dante ? 
I do not know that we have any right to inquire (though 
we cannot help it), and certainly it is quite fair that we 
should not know. It is enough for us to know that, like 
Dante, having seen Hell, and set Cordelia shining like a 
star above its brown and fiery airs, he climbed out of it, 
and saw the stars again in Cymbeline, and Winters Tale, 
and in the Tempest. 

Whatever it was, it took him down, in imagination, not 



KING LEAR 199 

only into the infinite tenderness of Cordelia, but into the 
primeval brutalities of uncivilised man, into the unre- 
strained lust, cruelty, and greed of savage humanity ; even 
into their unnatural violation of natural piety. Moreover, 
during these years he went down into the slums of human 
nature. And there, in his realism, he found Thersites, 
and Pandarus, and the vile things he made men in 
Measure for Measure. And these, Thersites and the rest, 
belonged to a decaying, but a civilised society. The vices 
in Tfoilus and Cressida, in Measure for Measure, and in 
Timon of Athens are the vices of a decadence. 

In King Lear the social scenery is quite different. 
The evils are those which characterise the beginnings of 
a society when men are emerging from savagery and 
retain much of its brutality. Gloucester's light talk 
before his bastard son of his lust with his mother is a 
slight instance of this. The tearing out of Gloucester's 
eyes by Cornwall and Regan (the woman urging on the 
hateful deed) is a piece of primeval cruelty. The hanging 
of Cordelia belongs to a brutal society. So does the lust 
for Edmund of both the sisters in its bold expression. 
And the unnatural absence in Goneril and Regan of any 
shred of filial piety towards their father, combined with 
cruelty to him, and plotted against him by both from the 
beginning, is such guilt as could not be openly practised 
in a society which had been civilised. But here it is 
open, boasted of, rejoiced in by its doers, claimed to be 
statesmanlike. This is pure savagery developing itself 
with frank selfishness in the atmosphere of irresponsible 
power. We are at the beginning, not at the end of a 
nation, midst of antique barbarities. Whether Shake- 
speare deliberately put in this local colour (knowing that 
his story belonged to early Britain), we cannot tell, but 
we are certainly placed in the midst of a primeval society, 
where gigantic figures and gigantic pains pass across the 



200 LECTURES ON SHAKESPEARE 

stage, and speak a gigantic language; where all that is 
said and done arises out of the first unmodified elements 
of human nature. And this last is as true — on the other 
side — of Cordelia's love and Kent's loyalty as it is of 
Regan's hardheartedness and Cornwall's treachery. The 
good in the play is also of early human nature. 

The tragedies of iEschylus do not place us in quite 
so savage, so unmoral a world as we are in King Lear. 
Their world is more civilised. The murder of Agamemnon 
is accounted for. It is by no means unnatural, as the 
conduct of Goneril and Regan. A Greek audience would 
not have borne to look on this drama. 

It may be said that the central horror which drives 
the (Edipus of Sophocles into a desolate world is as 
ghastly as the cruelty which drives Lear into a ruined 
world, but (Edipus takes with him his daughters' love; 
and in the end the just gods give him peace. There is 
no such close to Lear. We are left in darkness that may 
be felt. Cordelia suffers for her goodness as Goneril and 
Regan for their guilt. 

There is reason for Orestes' slaying of his mother, 
and a rude Justice demanded her death, yet the sinner 
against natural piety is driven to madness by the Furies, 
till, after terrible days, he is solemnly judged and puri- 
fied. But no Furies, not even the inward snake of 
Remorse, pursue the unnatural impiety of Goneril and 
Regan. They die of their own lust. And no God lives 
in King Lear; no divine Justice interposes to save 
Cordelia. There are many who think Shakespeare might 
have saved her. But he was not in the temper to do 
that justice. As the world is, the best for her, he thought, 
is that she should leave it. 

Or if at times the gods are spoken of, they are gods 
who make their sport out of the tragedies of man. Not 
even the abstraction Nature avenges on Goneril and 



KING LEAR 201 

Regan their violation of her earliest law. Lear appeals 
to her in vain ; and himself violates her call upon him. 
In the unchecked ill-temper of absolute power, he is 
unnatural to his well-loved daughter, and flings her in a 
moment out of his heart. And when he finds himself 
flung away in turn by the daughters to whom he has 
given all — his language, in its intellectual splendour and 
passion, is the language of one who has gone beyond 
Nature in his anger. He is not mad when he pours his 
curse of ardent sulphur on the head and womb of Goneril. 
The soul of an audience shudders (almost as much as 
when Goneril and Regan drive the King forth into the 
storm) when Lear, in unforgettable grandeur of savage 
imagination, calls on Nature herself to blast his daughter. 

Hear, nature, hear ! dear goddess, hear. 

Furious passions, wild lands, untilled society, savage 
beginnings of the world ! 

Edmund belongs to that world by the cool cruelty 
with which he orders Cordelia to be hanged, but his vices 
are rather the vices of a civilised society. Greedy of 
power and wealth, no motion of conscience troubles him 
till he has received his death wound. Then his repent- 
ance is modern. His speeches then seem out of harmony 
with the general note of the play. Even at the beginning, 
he is not of the ancient world. His soliloquy about his 
bastardy, and his claim to be the lusty child of Nature ; 
his scorn of custom, convention, and law, because he is 
himself an illegality ; his call on the gods to stand up for 
bastards, are far removed from the earlier world. They 
breathe of the reckless life of that Italy which Shake- 
speare knew from the stories of the novellisti. His 
deliberate and soulless treachery is also apart from the 
rough vices and antique honour of a half- savage society. 
Treachery is a vice of civilisation ; and the cunning and 



202 LECTURES ON SHAKESPEARE 

conscienceless traitor who sacrifices father and brother 
for his lust of power, who carefully weighs whether 
Goneril's or Regan's love will be most to his advantage, 
without any love for either of them, is entirely in 
tune with the Italy of the Borgias. He is also intel- 
lectual enough ; and sees his own blackness, and the self- 
cheating of the men of the world, with the clearness 
and coolness of Machiavel himself. That self-excusing 
hypocrisy of society which Lear in his madness sees, and 
slashes as with a sword, Edmund also sees and mocks 
at, not only in others, but in himself. But Lear hates 
hypocrisy and treachery; Edmund loves to wear them, 
and use them for his self- advancement. 

To this antique world belongs also the rough-speaking 
loyalty and faithfulness of Kent. But his rugged 
manners are born of his love for Cordelia, and of the 
incredible folly of Lear not only in banishing her but in 
giving away his power — 

Be Kent unmannerly, 
When Lear is mad. What wouldst thou do, old man ? 
Think'st thou that duty shall have dread to speak, 
When power to flattery bows ? To plainness honour 's bound, 
When majesty stoops to folly. 

Kent is the plain, faithful man, who has never minced 
his words nor filed his mind ; and it is characteristic of 
Shakespeare's insight that when Kent is in disguise he 
exaggerates his plainness of speech. His disguise sets 
him loose from the restraint his high position imposed 
on him, and he pleases himself by his freedoms of speech 
and act. His attack on Oswald, whom he abhors for his 
flattery and knavery, is ferocious, but it delights him to 
make it. No servant, such as he seems to be, would have 
dared it, but the Earldom of Kent is at the back of his 
boldness. With all this bluntness, he is as tender as he 
is faithful. He never leaves the King who has banished 
him; tends him like a nurse through storm and mad- 



KING LEAR 203 

ness ; and Cordelia is always in his heart. When Edgar 
meets him near the end of the play, his love of Lear and 
Gloucester, his surcharged pity, break down his sturdy 
strength. His grief grew puissant and the strings of life 
began to crack. At root, he is half Cordelia. He says 
but little as the Earl of Kent in the play, but all the 
political conduct of its affairs is in his hands — one of 
those steadfast men, with the gift of fidelity to persons 
and to long-established ideals, and with the gift of silent 
common sense, who, when affairs are stormy, holds the 
helm quietly, directs the ship, and brings it safely to land. 
Shakespeare was sure to make a little study of such a 
man. It is true that Kent is, when he is acting as a 
servant, opulent of abusive words, and talks like a torrent. 
But that is because he is in disguise. 

When, for any reason, we get into such a disguise that 
no one knows us, or can compare us with the character 
we have built up before society — then our loosely-held 
thoughts, our individual imaginations, the convention- 
shocking things we have concealed, the queer tempers we 
have hushed to rest, tumble out in our words and ways, 
because we are no longer shy or afraid of society. We are 
delighted to have the chance of free expression, of being 
quite true to ourselves. This is true of Kent in the scene 
in the courtyard when he trounces Oswald. 

It is still more true of Edgar when he disguises himself 
as a madman. Edgar is at first the pink of propriety — 
as admirable in morals as in manners. He would not be 
out of place in a London drawing-room. His existence, 
alongside with Goneril and Regan and Lear, is an ana- 
chronism. Yet, what lay in him unexpressed ? All that 
we listen to from the lips of Poor Tom ! In his disguise 
he lets loose the original thoughts, the unconventional 
things which his soul had mused on and concealed. We 
get the Edgar which lived underneath the Edgar of 



204 LECTURES ON SHAKESPEARE 

society. He plays the madman so well that he seems 
to like it; and probably he did. He was free. In the 
midst of his mad inventions, sayings appear pregnant 
with meaning, vivid with a naked liberty. His account 
of himself as a worthless, dissipated fellow is at every 
point different from what he was in life. He sketches, 
that is, what one of the natures in him might have made 
him. He sketches another Edgar who might have ended 
in beggary and been haunted by the fiends. He hits too 
much truth when he says — ' The Prince of darkness is a 
gentleman.' Lear, who himself is then half-way to mad- 
ness — a situation in which a man is keenly intelligent — 
feels that Edgar's talk has strange reason at its back. 
He cries, 

Noble philosopher, your company. 

I will keep still with my philosopher. 

When Edgar puts off his madness, having gone through, 
misery, starvation, and cold, he is more just in feeling, 
higher in intellectual insight, than he was in his luxuri- 
ous days. He knows what man is worth, and what is 
best. We hear to what conclusion he has come, when we 
meet him on the wild heath in his rags, alone. 

Yet better thus, and known to be contemn'd, 

Than still contemn'd and flatter'd. To be worst, 

The lowest and most dejected thing of fortune, 

Stands still in esperance, lives not in fear : 

The lamentable change is from the best ; 

The worst returns to laughter. Welcome then, 

Thou unsubstantial air that I embrace ! 

The wretch, that thou hast blown unto the worst 

Owes nothing to thy blasts. But who comes here 1 

Enter Gloucester. 
My father, poorly led ? World, world, world ! 
But that thy strange mutations make us hate thee, 
Life would not yield to age. 

And at the close, his conduct is worthy of a noble gentle- 
man who, while defending truth and loyalty, is tolerant 



KING LEAR 205 

to his false and treacherous brother when he is dying 
and a little repentant. 

I scarcely need to speak of Albany : he is almost a 
cipher in the play, but he comes to the throne at last. 
Nor is he so weak as he appears to be when seen side by 
side with the fierce violence of Goneril. She seems to 
blot him out. When he is freed from her he is quite 
strong enough for affairs. He does shrink from the 
scenes Goneril makes him, and no wonder; and he 
seems a feeble person ; but when all the violent men and 
women are destroyed by their own violence, the quiet 
man comes out at the top. He has made no enemies, 
and he has staying power. Moreover, it is worth saying 
that his shrinking from violent action serves to produce 
the one speech which renders, for a moment, Goneril 
endurable. 

I pass on to Lear, and before the terror and sorrow 
of his tragedy one feels incompetent to speak. The 
genius who created it soars beyond our ken. When we 
meet him first, he is that wretched thing — an old man 
who, because he has, without one check, ruled for many 
years his kingdom and his household, thinks that his will 
is absolute wisdom. The serene vanity of this is only 
equalled by the folly into which his vanity leads him. 
He is blind to his own folly ; blind to the fact that his 
two daughters hate him; blind when, with the embroi- 
dered eloquence of hatred, they tell him that they love 
him ; blind to the character of Cordelia, though she has 
truly loved him ; blind to the worth of Kent ; blind to the 
political results which (even if his daughters loved him) 
would inevitably follow on the partition of the kingdom ; 
and equally blind to the personal results which were 
sure to follow on an irresponsible person like himself, 
with a train of a hundred knights and with a violent 
temper, wandering about from one petty court to another. 



206 LECTURES ON SHAKESPEARE 

Inevitable then would be the irritation, the quarrels, and 
finally the fury of the situation. There are critics of the 
medical profession who say that Lear was already mad 
when he did this; and base their explanation of his 
character on this supposed fact. But Lear was no more 
mad now than thousands of persons, perfectly sane in 
society, are, when, by long dwelling on themselves, they 
have become compact of vanity. 

Lear is a sane and healthy giant of a man when first we 
meet him. It is only after fearful and redoubled shocks 
which subvert everything he has believed, and after a pro- 
tracted struggle against their maddening assault, that he 
finally loses his will-power over his brain. And, even then, 
it is complete madness only for a time. He slips in and 
out of madness. Edgar, listening to his wild talk near 

Dover, cries 

0, matter and impertinency mix'd ! 
Keason in madness ! 

Then he recovers sanity with Cordelia, but is shocked 

back again into merciful insanity by Cordelia's death. 

Violent temper, sure to be nursed into greater violence 

by unchecked power, may be called madness, and lead to 

madness, but it is not madness. It does lead Lear to 

madness when it is lashed to overstrain by his effort 

to restrain it. Its long indulgence in the past is shown 

by the ease with which he slips into immediate furies of 

wrath. 1 He curses Goneril without a pause, without a 

question. Even before these outbursts, we remember the 

petulant impetuosity with which in a moment he flings 

Cordelia out of his heart. 

1 Compare what the tribunes say of Coriolanus : 

Put him to choler, straight. He hath been us'd 

Ever to conquer, and to have his worth 

Of contradiction : being once chaf 'd, he cannot 

Be rein'd again to temperance : then he speaks * 

What 's in his heart ; and that is there which looks 

With us to break his neck. 



KING LEAR 207 

Nevertheless, even in this first scene, we forgive him 
much because at the root of his follies he desires so 
strongly to be loved. For that, and moved by pity for 
the weakness of his violence, we do forgive him, but feel 
that indeed he needs forgiveness. Our forgiveness is in 
our pity, and our pity is touched with a just contempt. 
Afterwards we pity him altogether, because his trust in 
love is betrayed where he most believed, and his desire 
for love is crucified by those from whom he desired it. 
There is no pity in Goneril and Regan. Their short 
sharp consultation at the end of the first scene tells us 
that their cruelty has been long determined on. Their 
observation of their father's character has 'not been 
little ' ; and now they have got power, they will make 
him understand how 'slenderly he has known himself.' 
1 We must do something,' says Goneril, ' and i' the heat.' 

Men put down the shameful conduct of Goneril and 
Regan to natural, inherent malignity. They are bad in 
grain, as Cordelia is good in grain; but their steadfast 
hatred of their father is not without some cause; and 
Shakespeare leads us to infer this. He rarely leaves 
what seems against nature without suggesting some 
reason for it. Just imagine what those two haughty, 
high-tempered, hard-hearted, icy-minded, very intelligent 
women, who were now about forty years of age, had 
suffered from their overbearing, hot-tempered father. 
They had inherited their father's temperament, but had 
been forced to keep it down for all these years, and to 
suffer in the repression. It is not difficult to conceive 
what a huge heap of silently borne insults, abuse, violent 
discourtesies, was piled up within their memories; how 
long they had nursed their wrath; how the hypocrisy 
with which they had borne their slavery irritated that 
wrath daily, and how long their souls desired revenge. 
There is some reason — I had almost said excuse — for 



208 LECTURES ON SHAKESPEARE 

their conduct. It was the result not only of their wicked, 
merciless nature — it was also caused by the long oppres- 
sion which claimed to be just and loving when it was only 
selfish — and it grew into a steady hatred of their father. 

It is hate that speaks in their icy words, long-cherished 
hate, infinite boredom, years of silent, smouldering irrita- 
tion. Fathers who believe that their children are bound 
by natural law — even after they are grown up — to endure 
anything from them and their tempers; who think, 
because of their fatherhood, that they may treat their 
children as they dare not treat their acquaintances ; who 
claim every submission from them as a right, and are 
furious or sulky if the claim is not allowed, are terrible 
plagues ; as dangerous to the small society in which they 
live as ferocious tyrants are to a nation. They often 
make such hatred in their children as Lear made in 
Goneril and Regan. Such hatred is common enough, 
but the cases are few where the children, like Goneril 
and Regan, get the power to work their retaliation. 
When then we think of what they did, of their relentless 
driving of the old man into the black storm, into despair 
and madness — when the cold devilry of their savage care- 
lessness appals the sense — let us remember that it was 
not without a cause. 

Even Cordelia must have suffered from her father. But 
Cordelia was born good, and suffering only educated her 
goodness into greater goodness. Yet when Lear is so un- 
worthy as to measure his gifts by the love outwardly pro- 
fessed to him before witnesses ; when she sees that he is 
blind to the inner wickedness of Goneril and Regan, and to 
her own devotion, she is almost tried too much. She is a 
little short with her father. She lets her scorn of the whole 
affair appear in her silence. ' What have you to say, my 
daughter ? ' ' Nothing, my Lord.' Her long-tried love is 
indeed not lessened. But it cannot stand the hypocrisy 



KING LEAR 209 

of the whole scene. Nor is she gentle to her sisters, 
whose savage heart she knows ; nor does she hesitate to 
let her scorn fall on Burgundy who will not have her as 
wife when she has no dowry. She is not quite the 
unimpassioned angel so many represent her to be — and 
let us be thankful for that. Her exquisite gentleness, her 
unspeakable tenderness and pity, her human love, would 
miss something of their perfection had she no anger 
against cruelty, no scorn of meanness and hypocrisy. 

There is a drawing by Ford Madox Brown of Lear in 
this first scene. He is represented as a huge old man, 
half-sunk in his great chair, unable to move, a ruin of a 
man. I have seen Irving represent Lear, and all through 
this first scene he shook like a man who had suffered 
from palsy. Irving pictured a broken man. But Shake- 
speare did not mean Lear to resemble either of these 
impersonations. Lear was one of an early race of men, 
strong even in old age. All his life he had lived in the 
open. Age had not weakened his body any more than 
his mind. There is no physical feebleness suggested in 
this first scene ; and when we meet him again he comes 
home from a hunting with his hundred knights, vigorous, 
and ready for feasting and drinking. ' Let me not stay,' 
he shouts, ' a jot for dinner ; go, get it ready.' And this 
hunting and feasting has been going on for a fortnight. 
This was the Lear of Shakespeare, and that he made him 
a hale, strong old man deepens the tragedy of his breaking- 
up, accounts for the protracted struggle he makes 
against his sorrows, for the awful agony he undergoes in 
the struggle, and afterwards for the fury and strength, as 
of a wounded Titan, with which he outfaces and outdoes 
the rage of the storm. It is no half-paralysed old man, 
but a giant smitten to the heart, who is finally broken 
down. This, I think, is what the actor should embody. 
His agony begins at the house of GoneriL Lear has 

o 



210 LECTURES ON SHAKESPEARE 

struck one of her gentlemen for chiding of his fool. And 

her revenge is started. Put on, she cries to Oswald, what 

negligence you f please — I will get rid of him. 

Idle old man ! 
That still would manage those authorities 
That he hath given away. 

To torture him is pleasant to her. The fool, who sees 
clearly Lear's folly because folly knows folly, presages that 
which Lear does not imagine. His gibes shake the con-, 
fidence of the King, and when Goneril comes in he is 
prepared a little for her vicious use of the power he gave 
her — for her sharp lecture on him and his insolent 
retinue. Still, he is taken aback. 'Are you our 
daughter ? ' This is not Goneril — and am I Lear ? — and 
the solid earth seems to dissolve into illusion with this 
change of his habitual life. Never before has he met 
with a check. No wonder his very personality seems to 
desert him. ' Is this Lear ? ' ' Who is it can tell me 
what I am ? ' ' Lear's shadow ! ' answers the bitter fool 
— and Lear uses the impression he has received to pre- 
tend, in scorn, that he does not know Goneril, meets her 
with impotent sarcasm — 

Your name, fair gentlewoman ! 
At this scorn Goneril's savage rage, ice cold, pours down 
upon his head. 'His retinue makes her court like a 
riotous inn. The life he leads is a shame for an old 
man, who should be reverend. Disquantity your train. 
Let them be fifty, not a hundred, and know yourself.' 

At which the fierce temper of the King breaks out, and 
with it the agony which ingratitude awakes. There is no 

moderation in his words. 

Darkness and devils ! 
Saddle my horses ; call my train together. 
Degenerate bastard ! . . . 
Woe, that too late repents. 

Detested kite ! thou liest. 



KING LEAR 211 

He thinks of Cordelia. Shakespeare, with one touch, 
marks how Lear has sorrowed in grim silence for his loss 
of her. When Lear hears that his fool has pined away- 
after her departure, he cries 

No more of that : I have noted it well. 
This inward sorrow for Cordelia adds itself to the first 
agony he suffers from Goneril, and both together beat him 
into fury. Then comes that appalling curse — primeval in 
its antique simplicity, terrible on a father's lips, coming 
home to that which is deepest in a woman — appealing to 
great Nature herself, one of whose first laws Goneril had 
injured. 

Hear, nature, hear ; dear goddess, hear ! 
Suspend thy purpose, if thou didst intend 
To make this creature fruitful : 
Into her womb convey sterility : 
Dry up in her the organs of increase, 
And from her derogate body never spring 
A babe to honour her ! If she must teem, 
Create her child of spleen ; that it may live 
And be a thwart disnatured torment to her. 
Let it stamp wrinkles in her brow of youth ; 
With cadent tears fret channels in her cheeks ; 
Turn all her mother's pains and benefits 
To laughter and contempt ; that she may feel 
How sharper than a serpent's tooth it is 
To have a thankless child ! — Away, away ! 

Higher and higher, passion rising over passion, climbs the 
storm within ; his tears break forth. They terrify him and 
shame him, and his curses redouble. 

Blasts and fogs upon thee ! 
Th 5 untented woundings of a father's curse 
Pierce every sense about thee ! 

And all the time Goneril stands by, cool, rigid, relentless, 
enjoying her father's pain, happy in the thought that 
Regan will carry out to the full that which she has begun, 
beating down the weak interference of Albany with politic 
reasons. ' He is dangerous ; he will try to resume his 



212 LECTURES ON SHAKESPEARE 

power. I know his heart/ she says, thinking of all she 
has suffered in the past. 

The agony of Lear has begun. We meet him next at 
Gloucester's castle, where he has gone to throw himself 
on the kindness of Regan. She is of even harder granite 
than her sister. Yet Lear, though he has lived with her 
for many years, knows nothing of her character. He 
speaks of her 'tender-hefted nature,' of her comfortable 
eyes. What sort of a father has this man been ? He has 
lived wholly in himself! 

Regan is cruel for cruelty's pleasure ; Goneril is cruel 
more for policy than pleasure. Both are cruel from a 
settled hate. When Cornwall says that Kent shall sit in 
the stocks till noon, Regan cries, ' Till noon ! till night, my 
lord, and all night too.' When Gloucester is brought in 
as a traitor, her cruelty is savage. She makes them bind 
him ' hard, hard, the filthy traitor ! ' She plucks his beard 
and tears out his hair. When Cornwall plucks out one of 
Gloucester's eyes, her fury of cruelty calls for the other. 

One side will mock another ; the other too. 

She tells him, to double his physical pain, that his son 

has betrayed him to them, and rejoices to add to his 

physical pain the sorrows of the heart. Her last words 

are incarnate cruelty — 

Go thrust him out of gates, and let him smell 
His way to Dover. 

This is the creature to whom Lear flies for refuge from 

Goneril. It is flying from the tigress to the shark ; and 

Lear is driven out into the storm and the unsheltered 

hill. It is Regan who says to Gloucester asking pity 

for her father — 

0, sir, to wilful men 
The injuries that they themselves procure 
Must be their schoolmasters. Shut up your doors. 
Corn. Shut up your doors, my lord ; 'tis a wild night ; 
My Regan counsels well ; come out o' the storm. 



KING LEAR 213 

The frigid ruthlessness of this lifts our indignation into 

that excited temper to which the immensity of passion 

in the scene of Lear in the storm brings no surprise. By 

slow degrees, by many careful touches, step by step, we 

arrive to the central scene on the wild heath of outward 

storm and inward passion. 

All through this scene between Regan and Lear, Lear 

is trying, fearful of his brains, to restrain himself, to keep 

his head. He excuses Cornwall for not coming to meet 

him. ' He may be ill ; and then we are not ourselves ; I 

will forbear.' Suddenly he looks at Kent in the stocks, 

and his passion breaks loose. 

Death on my state ! wherefore 
Should he sit here ? 

And he swears he will beat the drum at Regan's doors 
till she come forth. Then he feels he is losing self- 
command. 

me, my heart, my rising heart ! But down ! 
When Cornwall and Regan appear, he is quiet and scorn- 
ful, but when it dawns on him that Regan is perhaps 
one with Goneril, his fury cannot be repressed. He curses 
Goneril ; calls, like Caliban, on the plagues of the morbid 
earth to infect her bones. Then he falls back again into 
piteous appeal to Regan, who, grim as death, bids him 
hear the trumpet that announces the arrival of Goneril. 
The sight of her maddens Lear; and he calls on the 
heavens, who themselves are old, to take his part — a 
splendid imagination, which links his sorrow to the 
sorrow of the universe. 

I will not go through the rest. Lear changes, as 
before, from bursts of passion to quiet entreaty. Beaten 
to and fro from the weather of fury to the weather of 
self-control, and in the contest fearing to be mad — repelled 
at every point with icy severity, patient in vain — till at 
last he knows that all is useless and that his mind is 



214 LECTURES ON SHAKESPEARE 

breaking. ' O fool ! I shall go mad ! ' he cries, and rushes 
out into the tempest. 

He is not really mad all through this scene, nor is he 
physically broken down. His strength of mind and body 
is gigantic. He has made a desperate fight for self- 
control. When we meet him again, on the moor and in 
the storm, he is not yet mad, nor weak of body. He is 
fighting, like Prometheus, against the gods, who like his 
daughters are his foes. Nor is his intellect less strong 
than his body. The tempest in his heart has heightened 
for the moment all his powers ; and the insight, extent, 
and word-shaping of his intellect are greater than they 
have ever been. He sees not only himself, but the fate 
and sorrow and crime of the whole world. This passes, 
like a vision, in full realism, before his mind. And he 
concentrates the vision into speech. No madness as yet — 
but the intellect at its highest range and the emotions at 
their tensest strain. One touch — and they will slip over 
the border into madness, into that region where the will 
commands and forbids no more. That touch is given by 
the entrance of Edgar who plays the madman. Lear, 
surprised, lets loose his self-command — becomes a spirit- 
brother of Edgar; and being no longer tortured by his 
efforts to retain his self-control, slides into real madness, 
and is at once gentle, kindly, and scarcely troubled. Only 
now and then, little touches of sanity bring him back for 
a moment to the torture he has mercifully forgotten. 

No words can tell the imaginative greatness of the 
scene on the black and lonely moor and in Lear's black 
and lonely heart. To conceive it as it is conceived was 
a splendid imagination. To shape it then, and fix it in 
the evasive element of words ; to grip the heart of every 
moment of it, and to heighten and make it eternal in a 
poetry equal in thought and passion, was yet more 
splendid. Nor is a lower element neglected. It is 



KING LEAR 215 

pictorial as few scenes are in literature. We see the 
landscape, the night, the lightnings and the rain, Lear 
among them with his white hair upon the wind, the fool, 
Kent, the hovel, Edgar — not by set description, but by the 
flying words which glance across the passions and thoughts 
of the men. 

The tempestuous splendour is doubled and redoubled, 
flash on flash of lightning, crash on crash of thunder, 
amid the roaring wind. They are the fitting elements for 
Lear's passion which, louder and fiercer than the material 
storm, rains and thunders and lightnings, adding its in- 
tellectual tempest to the wind and rain. The fool's wild 
jesting gives a fresh wildness to the raging elements, and 
to Lear. When their wildness is at its height, Edgar's 
imitative madness awakes and deepens the growing mad- 
ness of Lear, and is itself in tune with the demoniac dark- 
ness, the biting wind, and the wicked ram. And, at last, 
Gloucester slips in (when Lear is wholly mad), to add his 
own half-insane sorrow to the dreadful night. 

At first, Lear is the master of the furious elements. 
Their rage is but the soulless reflection of his rage. He 
calls on them to blow and crack their cheeks, to drown 
the churches to the steeple-top, to rumble their bellyful. 
They can never reach the height of his passion. Then, 
with a swift turn of imagination, he sees the elements as 
the destroyers, and bids them, executors of all-annihilating 
Thought, singe his white head ; nay more, blot out of 
existence' book the base and cruel universe, nay, its very 
seeds of life — all germinating Nature herself — which 
could give birth to universal ingratitude. 

You sulphurous and thought-executing fires, 

Vaunt-couriers to oak-cleaving thunder-bolts, 

Singe my white head ! And thou, all-shaking thunder, 

Smite flat the thick rotundity o' the world ! 

Crack nature's moulds, all germens spill at once 

That make ingrateful man ! 



216 LECTURES ON SHAKESPEARE 

No madness breathes there, but imagination, winged by 
sorrow and wrath, soaring to heights beyond our know- 
ledge. Then, with another nimble turn of impassioned 
intellect, he cries that he does not tax the elements with 
original unkindness to him — 

Nor rain, wind, thunder, fire, are niy daughters. 
They owe me nothing, as my daughters do; but yet Goneril 
and Regan have made them slaves to beat him down — vile 
things, 

That have with two pernicious daughters join'd 
Your high engendered battles 'gainst a head 
So old and white as this. 0, 0, 'tis foul ! 

But he will still be patient, for again he dreads the 
shattering of his brain. And out of this momentary 
quiet (and his soul enlightened by all that he has 
suffered), he thinks, perhaps for the first time in his life, of 
the dreadful state of the world rather than of himself. But 
his thought is coloured by the hypocrisy he has met 
with. This too he links now with the elemental war. He 
pierces deep into the hidden blackness of mankind — down 
to its shameful roots — 

Let the great gods, 
That keep this dreadful pother o'er our heads, 
Find out their enemies now. Tremble, thou wretch, 
That hast within thee undivulged crimes, 
Unwhipp'd of justice : hide thee, thou bloody hand ; 
Thou perjured, and thou simular man of virtue 
That art incestuous : caitiff, to pieces shake, 
That under covert and convenient seeming 
Hast practised on man's life : — close pent-up guilts, 
Kive your concealing continents, and cry 
These dreadful summoners grace. — I am a man 
More sinn'd against than sinning. 

The passage is dark with the unlighted, hopeless vision 
of life that sets this play apart. Then for the first time, 
he feels that the fierce strain is more than the will can 
bear. ' My wits,' he says, ' begin to turn.' But they have 



KING LEAR 217 

not yet left him. His argument with Kent is as clear 
as high intellect can make it. 

Thou think'st 'tis much that this contentious storm 

Invades us to the skin ; so 'tis to thee ; 

But where the greater malady is fix'd, 

The lesser is scarce felt. Thou 'ldst shun a bear ; 

But if thy flight lay toward the roaring sea, 

Thou 'ldst meet the bear i' the mouth. When the mind 's free, 

The body 's delicate : the tempest in my mind 

Doth from my senses take all feeling else, 

Save what beats there. Filial ingratitude ! 

Is it not as this mouth should tear this hand 

For lifting food to 't ? But I will punish home. 

No, I will weep no more. In such a night 

To shut me out ! Pour on ; I will endure. 

In such a night as this ! Began, Goner il ! 

Your old kind father, whose frank heart gave all — 

0, that way madness lies ; let me shun that ; 

No more of that. 

All this is clear intelligence, and what follows is born of 
a higher intelligence. For, when he thinks of his own 
anger and pain, he is brought, as never before, to think 
of the pains of others — and out of a ruined King's 
mouth is heard the plainest judgment, since Langland, 
in English literature of the thoughtlessness of the great, 
and the misery of the poor — the first condemnation of 
the black villainy of the Social State — when Shakespeare, 
in his dark brooding over the guilt of man to man, and 
with a pitiful fury in his heart, puts these words into 
the mouth of Lear — 

Poor naked wretches, wheresoe'er you are, 
That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm, 
How shall your houseless heads, and unfed sides, 
Your loop'd and window'd raggedness, defend you 
From seasons such as these ? O, I have ta'en 
Too little care of this ! Take physic, pomp ; 
Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel, 
That thou mayst shake the superflux to them, 
And show the heavens more just. 



218 LECTURES ON" SHAKESPEARE 

There is no madness there — but at this instant Edgar's 
cry is heard — 

Fathom and half, fathom and half ! 
Poor Tom ! 

The imitative madness wakes the latent madness in Lear. 
His wits fly instantly. And it is curious how all his rage 
almost immediately departs, and only at short intervals 
revives. He ceases to think; ceases to argue. He is 
quieted by Edgar's companionship. He takes to him at 
once. He pities him because he has been ruined by his 
daughters. All his thoughts wander astray. He calls 
Edgar his learned Theban, his Athenian, his philosopher. 
Only once, his reason seems to return when he asks, 
looking at Edgar's nakedness — 

Is man no more than this"? Consider him well. Thou owest the 
worm no silk, the beast no hide, the sheep no wool, the cat no per- 
fume. . . . Thou art the thing itself ! Unaccommodated man is no 
more but such a poor, bare, forked animal as thou art. 

But this is only momentary, the last flare of expiring 
reason. Is this man ? this only ? Then I will be as he — 

Off, off, you lendings ! Come, unbutton here ! 

and he tears off his clothes as madmen do. In all the 
rest, in the hovel, in the farmhouse, Lear is mad and 
wanders like a madman. His arraignment of Goneril 
before the Fool and Edgar is terrible. His arraignment 
of Regan is more terrible, and the vision of her escaping 
is an absolute madman's cry — 

And here 's another, whose warp'd looks proclaim 
What store her heart is made on. — Stop her there ! 
Arms, arms, sword, fire ! Corruption in the place ! 
False justicer, why hast thou let her 'scape ? 

With what care, with what finish, with what pains of 
thought this slow advance of madness is built up ! No 
one can closely read it without laughing to scorn the 
view that Shakespeare was an artist who wrote without 



KING LEAR 219 

thought, who had no care for finish, who never blotted 
a line. Even if we did not know that he rewrote his 
Hamlet, and worked it for his own honour and posterity 
into twice the thing it was, these scenes in Lear would be 
enough to prove his intense persistency in finish. 

At this point of the play we lose sight of the Fool : nor 
do we hear of him any more till Lear, in his last frenzy, 
mixes him up for a moment with Cordelia. The two 
creatures who loved him most, and who were from the 
beginning of his agony always linked together in his 
mind, become for an instant of madness one when he bears 
Cordelia's dead body in his arms, crying aloud — 

And my poor fool is hanged. 

When first we meet the fool, Lear has not seen him for 
two days, and he wonders why, for they have loved one 
another. At last he knows in his heart that his fool is 
angry with him for his exiling of Cordelia, and he feels 
with that wrath and sorrow. He has reproached himself 
as deeply as the fool reproaches him ; and when he sends 
for his ' boy,' he knows what all his bitter sayings mean. 
They are the anger of love unjustly injured. But Lear's 
love for Cordelia has now returned in full flood. The fool 
feels its deep regret and pain, and forgives his master, but 
cannot help being bitter. Lear understands ; and their 
common love binds them together in the deep hiding- 
places of the soul. This is their mutual secret, and 
they give it no words. No one knows it but they alone. 
Therefore the old, the giant king, and the young, the 
delicate jester, cling together, in pathetic contrast, through 
all the furies of the battle between Lear and his daughters, 
through the terrible wild night on the pitiless moor. 
Nothing but death will part those who both love the lost, 
the mourned Cordelia. This is the atmosphere, the 
1 aura ' which Shakespeare has created around them ; and 



220 LECTURES ON SHAKESPEARE 

it makes the mysterious attraction which every one has 
felt steal into them from this c poor fool's ' heart in touch 
with the heart of Lear. 

The fool's love for Lear does not appear in words, for he 
loves Lear through his love for Cordelia. But Lear's love 
for the fool is expressed. It is something more than a 
king's light sentiment for a jester, and it develops into a 
deeper feeling during his agony. He calls him ' my pretty 
knave.' ' Poor fool/ he says, 

I have one part in my heart 
That 's sorry yet for thee. 

With his new thoughtfulness for others, begot of his 

suffering, Lear turns in the storm to feel with his fool. 

1 Come on, my boy, art cold ? ' — and he leads him into 

the shelter. What he has felt for the whole world of the 

poor, he feels for his delicate jester. As to the fool 

himself, he differs, with a world of difference, from all the 

other fools in Shakespeare's work. He seems more of a 

spirit than a man; elusive, evasive; the outlines of his 

thought, of his personality, continually changing like the 

images in a revolving kaleidoscope ; only one thought 

constant — the folly of Lear who banished Cordelia and 

gave all to those who hated him and her. Then he 

is half-witted, and the half which has no wit sings 

snatches of old songs, and his mind whirls, like a dancing 

marsh-fire, among shreds of thought and images ; but the 

other half which has wit remembers his past experience 

of men when he was saner than now. Half of what he 

says is close to the point, and he says it so bitterly that 

we know he has suffered from the heartlessness of the 

world. There is a stored up, half- cynical wisdom in the 

song he sings — 

Have more than thou showest, 
Speak less than thou knowest, 
Lend less than thou owest, 
Ride more than thou goest, 



KING LEAR 221 

Learn more than thou trow est, 
Set lees than thou throwest ; 
Leave thy drink and thy whore, 
And keep in-a-door, 
And thou shalt have more 
Than two tens to a score. 

And the rest of his wild talk in this scene is so sharp to 
the matter that Kent says 

This is not altogether fool, my lord. 

This mixture of sense and non-sense, of sanity and 
insanity running in and out of one another, adds to the 
mystery of his nature, to the feeling we have that he 
belongs in part to another world than ours. He has 
something of the attractiveness of an elf. And indeed 
he seems to come into the play out of the unknown, like 
a spirit, and he passes out of it like a spirit. He lives 
through the great agony of Lear, and dies when it is at its 
height. For he is delicate of body, sensitive as a child, 
and fearful. He trembles before the darkening frown of 
Goneril. When he finds Edgar in the hovel, he cries out 
in terror — ' Help me, help me ' ; and the cold night and 
bitter wind are more than he can bear. When he says in 
the farmhouse, to close the scene, 

I '11 go sleep at noon, 

he knows that his love and his life are over. He dies, and 
Lear is left alone. 

When we meet Lear again, he is safe in Dover, mad, 
but with intervals of sanity. I have no time to speak of 
the further picture of his madness when he meets Glou- 
cester and Edgar. It is worthy of close study. He is 
partly personal, partly impersonal. Nor does he repeat 
one image or thought of the previous outburst — save 
for an addition to his attack on the social state — an even 
bitterer cry against its blindness, carelessness, but chiefly 
its hypocrisy. What Goneril and Regan seemed to be, 



222 LECTURES ON SHAKESPEARE 

but were not, is at the bottom of his mind. In his better 
time he refuses, shamed, to see Cordelia. And then 
arrives Cordelia. And having been in the cold hell of 
hatred, the regions of thick ribbed frost where Goneril 
and Regan live, we find ourselves in heaven — in Cordelia's 
heart, warm with love, minute* and exquisite in tender- 
ness, where sweetness and beauty are enthroned. There 
are no words to tell the loveliness of her soothing voice, 
the golden beauty of her pity and her love. 
' All blest secrets,' she cries to the Doctor — 

All you unpublish'd virtues of the earth 
Spring with my tears ! be aidant and remediate 
In the good man's distress. — 

Shakespeare himself sketches her, as if he loved her beyond 
expression, in the words of one who saw her when she 
heard of the fate of her father. I must quote this match- 
less poetry. 

Kent. Did your letters pierce the queen to any demonstration of grief ? 

Gent. Ay, sir ; she took them, read them in my presence, 
And now and then an ample tear trill'd down 
Her delicate cheek : it seem'd she was a queen 
Over her passion, who most rebel-like 
Sought to be king o'er her. 

Kent. O, then, it moved her. 

Gent. Not to a rage : patience and sorrow strove 

Who should express her goodliest. You have seen 
Sunshine and rain at once : her smiles and tears 
Were like a better way : those happy smilets 
That play'd on her ripe lip seem'd not to know 
What guests were in her eyes ; which parted thence 
As pearls from diamonds dropp'd. In brief 
Sorrow would be a rarity most beloved 
If all could so become it. 

At last she finds him, and Lear, comforted, recovers his 
senses. And then Cordelia sees him as he sleeps. Lovely 
and lovelier are her words, but loveliest when he wakes. 
Yet they are as brief as her passion is deep. Her heart 
is too full for speech — sobbing breaks her voice, but every 
sentence is a world of feeling and of thought. 



KING LEAR 223 

0, look upon me, sir, 
And hold your hands in benediction o'er me : 
No, sir, you must not kneel. 
Lear. Pray do not mock me : 

I am a very foolish fond old man, 
Fourscore and upward, not an hour more nor less ; 
And, to deal plainly, 
I fear I am not in my perfect mind. 

Do not laugh at me ; 

For, as I am a man, I think this lady 

To be my child Cordelia. 
Cord. And so I am, I am ! 

Lear. Be your tears wet ? Yes, 'faith. I pray, weep not : 

If you have poison for me, I will drink it. 

I know you do not love me ; for your sisters 

Have, as I do remember, done me wrong : 

You have some cause, they have not. 
Cord. No cause, no cause. 

Not even in Imogen did Shakespeare ever reach the 
divine simplicity of passion that these words reveal and 
conceal. ' And so I am, I am.' ' No cause, no cause.' 
Out of the Eternal Love in a man these things come. 

The pity is so great that unthinking persons have wished 
for a happy ending to this play. There have been such 
remakings put upon the stage by audacious persons who 
did not know themselves or Shakespeare. He was in no 
mood for this. In the dark unbelief in any just gods 
which now, as I think, possessed him, he slays the 
guiltless, after in fierce justice he has" slain the guilty. 
Goneril, Regan, Cornwall, Edmund have died violently. 
Cordelia and Lear meet as violent a death. Cordelia is 
hanged, ignobly hanged by one as merciless as Regan. 
Nor is she alone in her fate. The course of affairs is cruel 
not only here, but everywhere. So Shakespeare thought 
in these sunless days. So thought Cordelia when they 
took her to prison. 

We are not the first 
Who with best meaning have incurred the worst. 



224 LECTURES ON SHAKESPEARE 

Yet, the indelible sweetness of Shakespeare's nature re- 
asserts itself in the redemption of the soul of Lear. Cor- 
delia has breathed upon him and he has received the Spirit. 
In the last sane things he says as he is led away to prison, 
his violence, love of luxury, hatred of the world, are far 
behind him, gone for ever. Love is best and the simple 
life. Prison and pain are nothing to love. Even the 
mystery of the world is solved by it. He is like a happy 
child. ' 

Come, let 's away to prison ; 
We two alone will sing like birds i' the cage : 
When thou dost ask me blessing, I '11 kneel down 
And ask of thee forgiveness : so we '11 live, 
And pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh 
At gilded butterflies, and hear poor rogues 
Talk of court news ; and we '11 talk with them too, 
Who loses, and who wins ; who 's in, who 's out ; 
And take upon 's the mystery of things, 
As if we were God's spies : and we '11 wear out, 
In a wall'd prison, packs and sects of great ones 
That ebb and flow by the moon. 

It is his last hour of happiness. When we next see him 
he comes in, seized again by frenzy, with Cordelia dead in 
his arms. All the world knows that heart-cracking scene, 
where in the face of Lear's Titan grief, all the rest speak 
only broken words. At last his heart breaks asunder : 

Thou 'It come no more, 
Never, never, never, never, never ! 
Pray you, undo this button : thank you, sir, 
Do you see this ? Look on her, look, her lips, 
Look there, look there ! — (Dies.) 

And Kent to Edgar who lifts the King, crying, 

Look up, my Lord, 

says the last word that thousands and thousands of men, 
in this wild world, have said to such a sorrow- — 

Vex not his ghost : 0, let him pass I he hates him ' 
That would upon the rack of this tough world 
Stretch him out longer. 



HISTOEICAL PLAYS 



VIII 
KING JOHN 

The play of The Life and Death of King John was 
written in the years which saw the production of the 
historical dramas of Henry VI, Richard II., and 
Richard III, and its proper date is 1594. About the 
same date The Merchant of Venice was written in which 
Shakespeare turned from history to romance. The 
source of King John is not to be found in any of the 
Chronicles, but in another play on the same subject, 
written 1589 by some mere playwright, and printed in 
1591, The Troublesome Raigne of King John. Shake- 
speare clung so closely to the framework and to the 
patriotic and anti-papal spirit of The Troublesome 
Raigne, that his own play may be called a recast of 
it, rather than an original play. Yet it is altogether a 
new thing. 

Its patriotism is as vivid, but less violent, and its 
opposition to the Papacy is not ferociously insisted on, 
but diffused through the substance of the play. The 
writer of The Troublesome Raigne used or misused the 
events of history as its writer pleased, and Shakespeare 
in his play took a similar licence. Why, being quite 
able, as in his other historical dramas, to follow history 
almost accurately, he chose in this drama to play 
pranks with facts, and in some cases without dramatic 
necessity, I can only conjecture, and indeed it does not 
make much matter. The real matter is the play itself, 
its presentation of human passions, and the probable 

227 



228 LECTURES ON SHAKESPEARE 

insight it gives us into the personal patriotism of 
Shakespeare. 

It may be amusing to find out Shakespeare's deliberate 
errors, and we can discover them in every text-book on 
this drama, but when we read or see the play, it is best, 
for the time, to assume that Shakespeare was right in 
his variations from the truth. History is one thing, and 
it is good, of course, to know the facts. But Art is an- 
other thing, and, however she may choose to manipulate 
the facts, she is excused if her deviation from fact enables 
her to create new images of humanity, and varied pictures 
of our life. If Shakespeare, for example, had followed 
historical fact, we should never have had the scene 
between Arthur and Hubert, or the wild magnificence of 
the grief of Constance, or Faulconbridge's steady loyalty 
to England when all seemed lost ; and even one of these 
representations is more important in its truth to human 
nature, and in its influence on humanity, than any 
accurate knowledge of the facts about King John. 

I should like to have seen Shakespeare at work on The 
Troublesome Raigne, which he took as his original. It 
is not quite a bad play, but his humorous rage at its 
weakness, false passion, and blundering execution, could 
only have been matched by the delight he had in re- 
conceiving, re-forming, re-charactering the whole of it. 
It is told of Michael Angelo that his friends brought 
to him a huge block of marble, ten feet high, which 
some futile sculptor had begun to shape, and then, in 
despair, had the grace to surrender. The great artist 
saw beneath the rude block the noble statue of David 
which stood for so long in front of the palace of the 
Signoria at Florence. He sprang upon it with chisel and 
mallet, in a fiery energy, and out of the formless marble 
emerged, as if at the voice of a God, the young conqueror 
of the Philistine. With a like fire and fury of creative 



KING JOHN 229 

energy, we may imagine Shakespeare hewing out his 
King John from the formless mass of the Troublesome 
Raigne. What joy was his as he felt, rising into speak- 
ing life beneath his hand, the terrible motherhood of 
Constance, the piteous childhood of Arthur, the growing 
manhood of Faulconbridge, the dignified statesmanship 
of Salisbury, and the strange figure, mingled of vile 
clay and gold, of the King whom he slew on so burning a 
couch because he had wronged England. There is no joy 
in the wide world to be for one moment compared to the 
joy of creation ; and all men of creative genius know and 
have loved that lonely rapture. 

' Slain, because he had wronged England ! ' That is 
part of the spirit which underlies this play. The 
patriotic emotion of the time, which the overthrow of the 
Armada had lifted into a passionate belief in the glory 
and honour of England, was deep in Shakespeare when 
he wrote this play. It breathes through all its Acts like 
flame. It has here a steadfastness of belief in itself which 
England has never lost. It is firmly based, in the character 
of Faulconbridge, on the will and feeling of the whole 
people. It conceives by his voice England as unassailable, 
or, if assailed, as secure of conquest while Englishmen still 
love their land. 

This England never did, nor never shall, 

Lie at the proud foot of a conqueror, 

But when it first did help to wound itself. 

Now these her princes are come home again, 

Come the three corners of the world in arms, 

And we shall shock them : nought shall make us rue, 

If England to itself do rest but true. 

The Bastard is Shakespeare's incarnation of the patriotic 
pride of the England of Elizabeth. And this is all the 
more remarkable because the King of whom Shakespeare 
writes was in his mind a bad representative of England. 
He paints one side of John as mean, greedy of power, a 



230 LECTURES ON SHAKESPEARE 

reptile in craft for selfish ends, a shrinking murderer, an 

ungrateful King. Yet he is at the head of England, and 

because he represents her by his position, he is to be 

supported ; not for his own sake, but for the sake of the 

country. The lords who, angry with John's murder of 

Arthur, join themselves to France are, in the eyes of 

Faulconbridge, degenerate and ingrate revolts, who like 

Nero rip up the womb of their dear mother England, and 

who should blush for shame. The very women, he says, 

will trip after the drum, and turn their thimbles into 

gauntlets, rather than yield England to the foreigner. 

Nor does Salisbury, joined to France, feel his position 

happy, even though he hates the murdering King — 

Is 't not pity, my grieved friends, 
That we, the sons and children of this isle, 
Were born to see so sad an hour as this : 
Wherein we step after a stranger, march 
Upon her gentle bosom, and fill up 
Her enemies' ranks, (I must withdraw and weep 
Upon the spot of this enforced cause), 
To grace the gentry of a land remote, 
And follow unacquainted colours here ? 

John was, historically, a Frenchman ruling over England. 
Of that Shakespeare knows nothing in the play. He feels 
to France as Elizabeth's England felt. The army of 
France in England is the army of a foreign invader, with- 
out a shred of right to meddle in the question of the 
heirship to the throne. And the island wrath of the soil 
of England ' heaves itself against ' the steps of an alien foe. 
Nothing lay deeper than that spirit in the England of 
Shakespeare, and he gave it voice. 

Another element pervades this drama, and belongs to 
the time at which it was written. It was resentment 
at the pretensions of the Church of Rome to assume an 
authority over England independent of the Crown. I have 
no doubt that Shakespeare expressed his own views and 
those of his audience on Papal interference in the answers 



KING JOHN 231 

John gives to the Legate, Pandulph. ' Tell the Pope this 

tale — 

and from the mouth of England 
Add thus much more, — That no Italian priest 
Shall tithe or toll in our dominions ; 
But as we, under heaven, are supreme head, 
So under Him that great supremacy, 
Where we do reign, we will alone uphold, 
Without the assistance of a mortal hand : 
So tell the pope, all reverence set apart 
To him and his usurp'd authority.' 

Pandulph, the Legate, answers by the excommunication 

which dissolved all human ties between the nation and 

the sovereign, blest those who revolted, and canonised as 

a saint him who took away by secret course the life of 

the King. 

And meritorious shall that hand be call'd, 
Canonized, and worshipp'd as a saint, 
That takes away by any secret course 
Thy hateful life. 

Imagine what Shakespeare's audience felt when they 

heard that anathema of death. It went home to the 

heart of the audience. There was not a man in the pit 

who had not heard that Home had treacherously played 

for the assassination of Elizabeth, had openly attacked 

her legitimacy, and urged the Roman Catholics of England 

to throw off their allegiance. I should like to have been 

in the theatre and heard the roar which saluted this 

dialogue between John and Pandulph. Then again, as the 

Cardinal speaks, Shakespeare paints the Roman Church 

as putting aside the most solemn vows, the conscience 

and honour and faith of men, if those were against her 

interests and power. King Philip appeals to the Legate to 

consider the new-made treaty which has put an end to a 

bloody war, which has been knit together 

With all religious strength of sacred vows. 

Shall we play 'loose with faith,' he cries, 'so jest with 
heaven, stain with blood the marriage-bed of peace ' ? 



232 LECTURES ON SHAKESPEARE 

0, holy sir, . . . 
Out of your grace, devise, ordain, impose 
Some gentle order. 

This appeal to natural morality, to Christianity, 
conscience, honour, and for peace, Rome flings away. 

Pand. All form is formless, order orderless, 

Save what is opposite to England's love. 
Therefore, to arms ! be champion of our church, 
Or let the church, our mother, breathe her curse, 
A mother's curse, on her revolting son. 

And the audience heard in the words the answer of 
Rome to Philip u. to let loose the Armada on the shores 
of England. 

Then follows, when the French King again appeals to 
the faith he has pledged to John, a speech by the Legate 
of the finest- woven casuistry, which is worth study as an 
example of Shakespeare's intellectual power throwing 
itself into the brain of a Roman Casuist labouring, for 
the sake of the Church, to dissolve all the bonds of 
honourable faith between man and man. And Pandulph 
ends, as usual, with Rome's reiterated threat of spiritual 
doom, bearing with it national ruin. 

As if this were not enough to blacken the character of 
Rome before the audience, there is placed a long conversa- 
tion between the Dauphin and the Legate, in which he 
comforts Lewis for his transient loss of Blanch by assum- 
ing, with cynical coolness, the certain death of Arthur, 
now in the hands of John, and the Dauphin's heirship to 
the throne of England as the husband of Blanch whom he 
will now marry. Not a ray of pity for the fate of the child 
crosses the mind of the Churchman. There is nothing 
in his mind but the supremacy of Rome. ' Come, noble 
Dauphin, John and England are in your hands. I will 
whet on the King.' He is just as dead to all human 
suffering when he hears Constance crying out her woe 



KING JOHN 233 

for her lost son. Philip is sorry for her. ' fair affliction, 
peace ! ' Pandulph is as hard as a stone. 

Lady, you utter madness, and not sorrow. 

And when, in words which might move the flint, she cries 
she shall not know her son in the court of heaven he will 
be so changed by suffering, this priest gives comfort 

thus — 

You hold too heinous a respect of grief. 

Oh, cries Constance in reply — seeing his frozen heart — 

He talks to me that never had a son. 

Not only public morality, but the tenderest ties of human- 
ity, are thus represented as despised by the Church, when 
her interests are endangered. Fancy how Englishmen 
followed all this — men who had heard of the pitiless 
massacre of St. Bartholomew's Day, of the cruelties of Spain 
in the Low Countries, of the blessing the Pope had given 
to the ravishing soldiery of the Armada, of the treacherous 
work in England. No play of Shakespeare appealed more 
strongly than this to the national heart and honour, and 
the national wrath with Rome. As I read it, I seem to 
hear Shakespeare's own passion beating in its verse. It 
may even be that it was owing to his personal sympathy 
with England's wrath with Roman pretension and 
treachery, that he chose, in the case of this play, not to 
follow the Chronicles, but to adopt as his source a play 
in which the facts of history could be manipulated as he 
pleased. He had thus a free hand so to modify and 
change events that they should be used to express his 
opinions and those of his hearers on the questions of his 
own day. Some explanation, at least resembling this, 
must be given of his reckless, apparently unnecessar}^ 
violation of historical fact. 

The character of King John is perhaps nearer to 
historical truth than anything else in the play. Only 
he is not quite so bad a man in it as he actually was. 



234 LECTURES ON SHAKESPEARE 

' Foul as hell is, hell is made more foul by the presence 
of John,' was the judgment of his contemporaries. This 
tradition has so influenced the critics of this play, that 
they have made the John of Shakespeare much more 
wicked and vile than the dramatist represented him. 
They have searched into every line for badness and 
have found it. But the King in Shakespeare's hands 
is no such unredeemed a villain. He is, as he really 
was, an able politician, a wise war-leader, a bold and 
ready pursuer of his aim. He stands up for England, 
and when he does submit to the Legate (changing 
apparently his steadfast mind) it is not so much to bow 
to Rome, as to overthrow — as he does — the whole of the 
conspiracy of his foes against the English Crown. He 
gains his end ; his revolting nobles are brought back to his 
dying bed, and the invaders are forced, raging, to leave 
the shores of England. Nor is he represented as a 
coward, as some have said. He is quite as physically 
though not so morally brave as Faulconbridge. 

On the moral side Shakespeare joins with his accusers. 
On that side he is represented as he is, the ruthless 
politician, the murderer of Arthur. But even that villainy 
does not turn Faulconbridge against him ; Faulconbridge 
who stands for England against the whole world ! John 
is a wicked king, but, wicked or no, he represents to 
Faulconbridge England and her fates. As such he clings 
to him, supports him when the rest leave him, cheers him 
in his dismay, reports him to the French as the gallant 
and victorious king, denounces the revolting lords, — and 
idealising him thus as the embodiment of England — comes 
even to love him, when he is ill fortuned, and finally to 
mourn his death. 

Art thou gone so ? I do but stay behind 
To do the office for thee of revenge : 
And then my soul shall wait on thee to heaven, 
As it on earth hath been thy servant still. 



KING JOHN 235 

And this double aspect of John — bad and good — under 

which the Bastard views his master is also Shakespeare's 

representation of him. It was not his cue, at a time 

when England stood alone against the envious Continent, to 

lower the monarchy of England. The case of Richard in. 

was different. To lower him was to exalt the Tudors, 

the true heirs of England in the eyes of an Elizabethan. 

Here King John was against France. He must not then 

be represented as infamous, even though he slew the 

rightful heir. The King stands for England. 

Therefore John, except as the murderer of Arthur, is 

not completely blackened in this play. No one, not even 

Henry v., can speak more kingly, more concisely, than 

King John to the ambassador of France ; nor did Henry v. 

act as rapidly, more like a great commander-in-chief, than 

John against France. He is on Philip's back before 

Philip thinks he has left England. In war, John is 

pictured as prompt to act, subtle to plan, making victory 

a certainty ; and when, out of a difficult position in which 

France and the Church are both against him, he has 

wrung victory, the French confess his genius in war and 

policy — 

Lew. What he hath won that hath he fortified ; 
So hot a speed with such advice disposed, 
Such temperate order in so fierce a cause, 
Doth want example : who hath read, or heard, 
Of any kindred action like to this I 

It is the description of a great general. 

Before the first fifty lines are over, we meet the two 
matters on which the whole of the play is to turn. First, 
we understand from Elinor's speech that Arthur's claim 
to the throne is just, that John holds it against him by 
force : ' Your strong possession much more than your 
right 5 is your title to the crown. The working out of 
that is half the play. The second point is that John 



236 LECTURES ON SHAKESPEARE 

and the Church are in ruthless opposition. And this is 

marked by John's cynical phrase — 

Our abbeys and our priories shall pay 
This expedition's charge. 

This quarrel rules the other half of the drama. These two 
points made in the first fifty lines are another illustration 
of Shakespeare's careful preparation for all that is to follow. 

Close upon this, following up John's denial of Arthur's 
claim to England, is the arrival on the stage of Faulcon- 
bridge, John's great supporter, who towers above all the 
rest, the natural not the legitimate cousin of the King. 
The scene is a curious one, and John appears in it, not 
as the rude, truculent villain he was, but as the grave 
dispenser of law, one who knows a man when he sees him, 
and welcomes him with frank and ready friendship. 

Nor is Shakespeare's King John less dignified, less regal 

in speech and act when he meets King Philip before 

Angiers. His defiance of France is grave and courteous, 

and when war is inevitable, what he says is thoughtful 

in its sorrow for war, even Christian in its feeling. 

Then God forgive the sin of all those souls 
That to their everlasting residence, 
Before the dew of evening fall, shall fleet, 
In dreadful trial of our kingdom's king ! 

This is not the speech of the foul king that history has 
drawn in the colours of hell. 

But now, and with a touch, he changes from this high 
mood into that evil temper which blackens all the good in 
him. His dominant passion is to keep the crown he has 
unjustly taken. Any wrong done for that seems right, 
and the doing away of Arthur is now the first necessity. 
Murder sits in his heart, ruthless, politic murder. France 
supports Arthur, and to divide France from Arthur, John 
agrees to marry Blanch, his niece, to the Dauphin — 

John, to stop Arthur's title to the whole 
Hath willingly departed with a part. 



KING JOHN 237 

This peace leaves Arthur unsupported ; he is no longer a 
danger to John ; but it earns and develops that maternal 
rage of Constance, which Shakespeare uses so magnifi- 
cently. 

When the Pope's Legate appears, the second element of 
the drama takes form. The Church is against John, for 
he has offended its supremacy. John answers him as 
Elizabeth's England would have answered. Shakespeare 
in this lifts high the figure of John. The Legate 
breaks up the peace. Philip is forced again to support 
Arthur against John, because John is against the 
Church. Arthur becomes again a danger; he is taken 
prisoner in the battle. And then — murder, long debated 
in alternating thoughts, determines itself for act. The 
good in John is drowned by the evil. Spite of conscience, 
of pity, of justice, and of honour, he will make his 
crown safe. But he is ashamed of the deed, or rather of 
entrusting it to another. Kichard in. has no shame for 
his murders; Macbeth performs his own, and it is a 
soldier's honour, and a host's, rather than conscience, 
which disturbs him. John shrinks from the murder, 
recoils from innocent blood ; conscience touches him, but 
no pity ; policy overtops conscience ; c he has a mighty 
cause to wish the death of Arthur.' But he fears his own 
design, fears to place it in words — wishes for the night to 
hide his soul from itself; wavers round the telling his 
desire to Hubert — dreads to hear it in words, for then 
it is irrevocably shaped. It is a wonderful passage, and it 
is worth while to compare it — with all its subtle differ- 
entiations — with the soliloquy of Macbeth before the 
slaying of Duncan. 

I had a thing to say, but let it go : 
The sun is in the heaven, and the proud day, 
Attended with the pleasures of the world, 
Is all too wanton and too full of gawds 
To give me audience : if the midnight bell 



238 



LECTURES ON SHAKESPEARE 



Hubert. 



King John. 



Hubert. 

King John. 
Hubert. 
King John. 
Hubert. 
King John. 



Did, with his iron tongue and brazen mouth, 
Sound on into the drowsy ear of night ; 
If this same were a churchyard where we stand, 
And thou possessed with a thousand wrongs ; 
Or if that surly spirit, melancholy, 
Had baked thy blood and made it heavy-thick, 
Which else runs tickling up and down the veins, 
Making that idiot, laughter, keep men's eyes 
And strain their cheeks to idle merriment, 
A passion hateful to my purposes ; 
Or if that thou couldst see me without eyes, 
Hear me without thine ears, and make reply 
Without a tongue, using conceit alone, 
Without eyes, ears and harmful sound of words ; 
Then, in despite of brooded watchful day, 
I would into thy bosom pour my thoughts : 
But, ah, I will not ! yet I love thee well. 
So well, that what you bid me undertake, 
Though that my death were adjunct to my act, 
By heaven, I would do it. 

Do not I know thou wouldst ? 
Good Hubert, Hubert, Hubert, throw thine eye 
On yon young boy : I ; 11 tell thee what, my friend, 
He is a very serpent in my way ; 
And wheresoe'er this foot of mine doth tread, 
He lies before me : dost thou understand me ? 
Thou art his keeper. 

And I '11 keep him so, 
That he shall not offend your majesty. 

Death. 
My Lord ? 

A grave. 

He shall not live. 

Enouo-h. 



What can be more dramatic than those five whispered 
sentences ? They are like the heavy strokes of a death-bell. 

Then, free from this fear, John has no remorse till his 
lords, hearing of the murder, leave him in burning indig- 
nation, and join the French invaders. Then he repents, 
not of the murder, but of the mistake he made. And 
he turns all his ill temper upon Hubert. His talk is a 
mingled skein. Now he thinks of his own danger ; now 
his conscience seems to trouble him. 



KING JOHN 239 

It is the curse of kings to be attended 

By slaves that take their humours for a warrant 

To break within the bloody house of life. 

There speaks the politician fearing for his crown. 

O, when the last account 'twixt heaven and earth 
Is to be made, then shall this hand and seal 
Witness against us to damnation ! 

And there speaks Conscience. Nothing can be more 

subtle than the interchanging play of these two motives 

in the talk of the King with Hubert, while as yet he does not 

know that Arthur is alive ; and that Shakespeare meant 

to represent this to and fro of policy and conscience in 

the soul of John, is plain from the last words where John 

says of the kingdom of his soul that in 

this confine of blood and breath, 
Hostility and civil tumult reigns 
Between my conscience and my cousin's death. 

This view of John, which makes him capable (unlike 

Macbeth and Richard) of feeling the call and sting of 

conscience, and therefore not altogether bad, is again 

insisted on by Shakespeare. When the lords see him 

conferring with Hubert, and suspect him of the murder of 

Arthur, Salisbury says 

The colour of the king doth come and go 
Between his purpose and his conscience, 
Like heralds 'twixt two dreadful battles set : 
His passion is so ripe, it needs must break. 

And John, ending the scene, cries out — 

I repent : 
There is no sure foundation set on blood, 
No certain life achieved by others' death. 

This is not the picture of a villain lost to all sense of 
shame, of an utterly ruthless character. 

He has been also accused of cowardice, but Shake- 
speare gives no hint of that. On the contrary, John 
answers quickly to the Bastard's cry — 

Be great in act as you have been in thought. 



240 LECTURES ON SHAKESPEARE 

It is only when the burning of the poison gnaws his heart, 
that his courage yields a little to mortal agony. 

This is Shakespeare's presentation of John — not alto- 
gether wicked, good and ill mingled in him ; swept into 
crime by policy, but sometimes repentant ; wise in action 
and thought; brave in battle; not overwhelmed by 
misfortune ; a murderer against his conscience ; a king 
who, because he stood against France and the Papacy for 
England, is half forgiven by Shakespeare who thinks of 
him as the Bastard thinks, and for the same reasons. 

I do not speak of the minor characters, of Philip, the 
Dauphin, of Salisbury and Hubert, even of Arthur. That 
high pathetic scene between him and Hubert, in which 
boyhood is so tenderly drawn, with such loveliness of 
poetry that it would awake the soul of pity had she 
slept for a thousand years, is so well known and loved 
that it needs no description, and is above analysis. I 
turn to Constance and to Faulconbridge. 

Faulconbridge is intended by Shakespeare to be, amidst 
a crowd of selfish kings, princes, and nobles, all pressing 
to their own advantage, an incarnation of the honest 
Englishman who loves his country, abjures the foreigner, 
clings to his king at all hazards because the king 
represents England; is not indifferent to his own 
interests; is bluff, outspoken, and brave as a lion, yet 
has a clear eye to see beyond the follies of the world 
into the serious heart of affairs. He can philosophise 
on the mad world, because he really stands apart 
from all the rest. Amid all the changes of politics, 
the quarrels which are knit and unknit around him, 
he is steadily consistent. The principles he lives by 
remain at the end what they were at the beginning ; 
they change only by development. Nor is he without 
natural and simple affection, the faithfulness of which 



KING JOHN 241 

is always to be relied on. He loves the King; I have 
already quoted his passionate farewell to his dead master. 
He heartens and consoles the King when misfortune 
lies heavy on him. He is faithful to the last, even when 
he disapproves the King. Yet when he sees the dead 
body of Arthur, and thinks that the King is guilty of 
the murder, his natural pity and indignation break out 
of his heart — ' Sir Richard, what think you ? ' cries 
Salisbury, and Faulconbridge replies — 

It is a damned and a bloody work ; 
The graceless action of a heavy hand. 

This is the man who, when we first meet him, has come to 
the court from the country to defend his claim to his 
father's property — denied to him because he is not his 
father's son, but a bastard got on his mother by Richard 
Cceur de Lion. But he loved fame more than property, 
and when he is recognised by the King as the son of 
Richard, when Elinor asks him to follow her fortunes and 
receive knighthood, he flings away his claim, and will live 
to make his own fortune and his own fame. He rejoices 
in his sonship to the great warrior ; he tells his mother, 
whom his affection consoles, that she was justified in 
yielding to the conqueror of the lion, that he is for 
ever grateful to her; and he leaves her happy and at 
ease. Brave, ambitious, rough and frank, he has yet a kind 
heart, and a wise mind in affairs because his heart is 
kind. 

Shakespeare lifts him in this scene out of the country- 
man into the courtier without lowering his character. 
No sooner is he in his natural element as a king's son, 
no sooner does he realise that here, in war and policy, 
he can fulfil all the dreams he must have had when 
lost in the solitude of the country, than he flings his 
old life away for ever with a laugh. He sees the varied 
movement of the great world open before him like a 

Q 



242 LECTURES ON SHAKESPEARE 

fan, and his spirit burns to join the mellay. John and 
Elinor watch his soul rise to his eyes ; they see the 
man emerge from the chrysalis ; and they knit him to 
their side. This is, cries Elinor — 

The very spirit of Plantagenet ! 

I am thy grand am, Richard ; call me so. 

Nevertheless, he is not carried away out of good sense by 

his new honours. I am, he says, with his good-natured 

cynicism — 

A foot of honour better than I was ; 
But many a many foot of land the worse. 

He laughs at the conventions of society which is chiefly 
made up of fools, but for that very reason suits a c mount- 
ing spirit ' like himself — one who observes, and will make 
of his observation means to grow — one who will soothe 
the world with deceit's sweet poison when it is necessary, 
yet will, on the whole, be true. This first of his solilo- 
quies paints him as less noble than he becomes. 

Shakespeare slowly develops Faulconbridge into a 
great nobility of character. Great affairs, in which he 
plays a serious part, lift him into greatness. There is 
that in him — his honest truthfulness, his unbroken faith 
— which makes him equal to arduous events, and above 
them. His large conception of England and of his duty 
to her and to the King as the image of England, enlarges 
his mind, strengthens him in difficulty, opens his soul and 
sets him apart, in dignified separation, from all these 
kings and nobles who are struggling, without any high 
idea of country and duty, for their own ends alone. He 
grows steadily from the brave and self-seeking man of 
the first Act, from the vainglorious soldier of the third, 
to the serious patriot and the honourable statesman of 
the last. 

Only one personal matter is at his heart. It is the aveng- 
ing of his father on Austria, his enemy. To give his anger 



KING JOHN 243 

full reason, Shakespeare makes Austria guilty of Cceur de 
Lion's death, which he was not ; and to enable his personal 
revenge, keeps Austria alive who had been really dead for 
some years. Faulconbridge mocks his enemy before the 
assembled princes, and in the battle slays him. When 
that is done, he has no more personal aims. He is for 
England only. 

At first, however, he is only the bold, boastful soldier 
who rejoices in the fight, and whose exultation expresses 
itself in an unbridled eloquence. He mouths his swelling 
words, as if Shakespeare were Marlowe. 

Ha, majesty ! how high thy glory towers, 
When the rich blood of kings is set on fire ! 
0, now doth Death line his dead chaps with steel ; 
The swords of soldiers are his teeth, his fangs ; 
And now he feasts, mousing the flesh of men, 
In undetermined differences of kings. 

Tis a pleasant vanity ! And so he goes through the 

whole debate, laughing and blustering, his manhood 

shouldering through the press, mocking the wordy citizens 

of Angiers — 

Here 's a stay, 
That shakes the rotten carcase of old Death 
Out of his rags ! 

He mocks even more at the Dauphin's sentimental love- 
making — no reverence in him for a French prince — and 
finally is contemptuous of them all ; and of himself, who 
would, if he could, join in their pursuit of gain. But 
there is a difference. They think their ends are worthy, 
and sacrifice honour, faith, and truth to win them. He 
knows that the means they use degrade their ends, and 
despises them for that; and despises himself when he 
follows their example. This is his soliloquy — 

Mad world ! mad kings ! mad composition ! 

John, to stop Arthur's title in the whole, 

Hath willingly departed with a part : 

And France, whose armour conscience buckled on, 



244 LECTURES ON SHAKESPEARE 

Whom zeal and charity brought to the field 
As God's own soldier, rounded in the ear 
With that same purpose-changer, that sly devil, 

That smoothed-faced gentleman, tickling Commodity 

Commodity, the bias of the world . . . 

This bawd, this broker, this all-changing word, 

Clapp'd on the outward eye of fickle France, 

Hath drawn him from his own determined aid, 

From a resolved and honourable war, 

To a most base and vile-concluded peace. 

But why rail I on this Commodity c i 

Not for because he hath not woo'd me yet : 

Not that I have the power to clutch my hand, 

When his fair angels would salute my palm ; 

But for my hand, as unattempted yet, 

Like a poor beggar, raileth on the rich. 

Well, whiles I am a beggar, I will rail 

And say there is no sin but to be rich ; 

And being rich, my virtue then shall be 

To say there is no vice but beggary. 

Since kings break faith upon commodity, 

Gain, be my lord, for I will worship thee. 

Such was his temper then — a warrior only and a self- 
pushing man of the world. But when Arthur is slain, and 
his master is in mortal danger, and England is invaded — 
these terrible events shake him out of himself into a 
graver, wiser, and nobler man. He speaks his mind about 
Arthur's death to the King with faithfulness, but he does 
not, like the rest, abandon the King. Even in the murder 
of Arthur, he feels how tierce was John's temptation. 
Moreover the King to him is England, and England now 
is the only mistress of the Bastard's soul. He becomes 
from henceforth the protagonist of the drama — the real 
king of events, the centre round which all the action 
revolves. And his character, purged of its half-cynic 
selfishness, rises to the level of his position. He speeds 
to the support of the King. He takes a lofty tone 
of reproof to the disloyal nobles who are false to their 
country. When the French land in England, he alone 



KING JOHN 245 

stands against them for England, gathers and arrays the 
forces of the kingdom. He lifts the despondent King 
with noble words into courage, bids him contend to the 
death, make no compromise, let no Cardinal make peace 
but make it with our own arms. These are his high- 
hearted words — 

But wherefore do you droop ? why look you sad ? 
Be great in act, as you have been in thought. 

He outfaces the Dauphin and the French lords with 
swelling words. He bids them hear, in his defiance of 
them, the voice of England's King. 

For thus his royalty doth speak in me. 

He leads the battle and supports it — 

That misbegotten devil, Faulconbridge, 
In spite of spite alone upholds the day. 

He does not despair even when half his power is lost in 
the Lincoln Washes; and, when the King is dead, his 
wisdom takes precedence and governs the action of the 
lords of the kingdom. He incarnates the constancy of 
England in the play. 

And now for Constance. Amid all this hurly-burly of 
wars, contending kings, selfish interests, walks like a spirit 
the awful figure of Constance — worn and wasted mother- 
hood maddened by loss and grief; primeval motherhood 
isolated from everything else in its own passion. 

Look, who comes here ! a grave unto a soul ; 
Holding the eternal spirit, against her will, 
In the vile prison of afflicted breath. 

When she is present, all the others recede into the 
background — are only scenery for her wild figure, with 
disordered garments and hair unbound, and the sound of 
death in her voice. The actress who should undertake 
her part is scarcely born in a century. It needs a majestic 
woman whose soul has lived in the depths ; it needs a 
man's strength to keep up so continuous a frenzy of 



246 LECTURES ON SHAKESPEARE 

passion. It needs a self-control, most rarely found in any 
artist, to prevent the fury of the part, its total abandon- 
ment, from carrying away the actress beyond the self- 
mastery she must hold over her emotion, lest her 
execution of the part should break down into feebleness, 
into mere rant and shouting. Moreover, she must have a 
noble intellect as well as a pitiful heart to act the part 
adequately ; and added to that — a spirit of imagination to 
feel the poetic passion in the speech of Constance. All 
she says, in her grief, is steeped in the waters of poetry ; 
the penetrating pity of imagination pierces through her 
words into the secret recesses of sorrow. 

As to the intellect required, the part needs to be con- 
ceived on large and simple lines, so as not to lose its 
grandeur ; and yet, within that simplicity, the part is so 
variously and finely conceived and wrought, that she 
who acts it must have a hair-dividing, subtle intellect to 
wind in and out among its changes. Constance is not 
mad ; she is only frenzied with grief, and the frenzy 
seems sometimes to rise into insanity. But she never 
loses the clear sequences of thought, and never (as a 
madwoman would do, as Ophelia does) gambols from the 
sense. Even her wildest cry, when she apostrophises 
Death, when she gets nearest to madness, is in intel- 
lectual order ! Instead of becoming (as a madwoman in 
excitement would certainly become) more incoherent, she 
becomes quieter and quieter to the end of the scene, more 
clear and simple. The changes are as subtle, as delicate 
as the changes of a cloud ; and their infinite interchange 
of feeling and thought needs a great intellect to con- 
ceive them, a passionate heart to follow their intricacy of 
emotion, and a great, grave, and self- mastering artist to 
represent them. 

When we meet her first, she has no grief, but eager 
wrath that her son is kept out of his heritage ; and keen 



KING JOHN 247 

desire, because she loves him, that he should have it. She 
does not care, because of any politic reason or desire of 
power, to make him king, but does care because he is her 
son, and she his mother. It is her love that is the motive. 
The motive of Elinor, her opponent, is love of power. Even 
in their first quarrel these motives are plainly disclosed : 
Elinor's violence is cool ; her policy and not her heart 
speaks. Every word of Constance is charged with the 
physical passion of motherhood. Motherhood, universal 
motherhood, the deep agony of the female in animals and 
in humanity ; — her defence of her young, her desire, her 
hope for them ; her fury at their loss, her rapture at their 
recovery ; motherhood unmodified by civilisation — it was 
that which rose into Shakespeare's soul and before his 
imagination, when he pictured Constance. Only, here he 
did not picture the happy motherhood of Hermione, or the 
proud joy of Volumnia in her son, but the misery of a 
mother's loss ; the tigress robbed of her whelps. 

For, indeed, Constance is a tigress. We do not under- 
stand the terrible frenzy into which her sorrow passes till 
we understand that she has a naturally violent temper. 
Her attack on Elinor is savage, and Elinor answers her in 
kind. These fine ladies have foul tongues, but Constance 
is the most furious. So loud is the battle between these 
two, and so much more fierce is Constance, that Arthur, 
the innocent cause, the little peaceful island in these 
stormy seas, is weary of the noise; — weary, the delicate 
child, almost of life. ' Good my mother, peace ! ' he cries. 

I would that I were low laid in my grave ; 
I am not worth this coil that 's made for me. 

And the French King, though on Constance's side, yet 

thinks she is too violent. 

Peace, lady, peace, or be more temperate. 

Her violence redoubles when the peace is made between 
England and France, and Arthur's cause is overthrown. 



248 LECTURES ON SHAKESPEARE 

The third Act begins with her indignant entrance on 
the scene — 

Gone to be married ! gone to swear a peace ! 

False "blood to false blood join'd. Gone to be friends ! 

Lewis marry Blanch ! boy, then where art thou ? 
France friend with England, what becomes of me ? 

In all this scene the unregulated violence of her speech is 
flashing with imagination. The poetry never fails, never 
weakens. There is not a word out of place ; scarcely a 
word too much. There is no fading into feebleness of 
the similes. They are crisp and short, and illuminate the 
passion of the woman. Thought runs to overtake the 
previous thought before the first has fully shaped itself — 
a mark of emotion at its height. When we think that 
she can say no more, she says something more rich and 
beautiful than she has yet said. 
' Pardon me,' says Salisbury — 

Pardon me, madam, 

I may not go without you to the Kings. 
Const. Thou mayst, thou shalt ; I will not go with thee : 

I will instruct my sorrows to be proud ; 

For grief is proud, and makes his owner stoop. 

To me, and to the state of my great grief 

Let kings assemble ; for my grief's so great 

That no supporter but the huge firm earth 

Can hold it up : here I and sorrows sit ; 

Here is my throne, bid kings come bow to it. 

The Kings enter. She rises from her throne on the ground 

like a queen of immortal wrath (like Margaret before the 

Tower), to curse the day when France has beguiled her, 

1 this day of shame, oppression, perjury,' and cries to the 

heavens in a splendid invocation. 

Arm, arm, you heavens, against these perjured kings ! 
A widow cries ; be husband to me, heavens ! 
Let not the hours of this ungodly day 
Wear out the day in peace ; but, ere sunset, 
Set armed discord 'twixt these perjured kings ! 
Hear me, 0, hear me ! 



KING JOHN 249 

Her wish is fulfilled. The Legate separates the peace, and 
there is war between France and England. But in the 
fight Arthur is taken, and the boy knows well what will 
happen. He loves his mother, and he cries — 
0, this will make my mother die of grief. 

And then, we see the grief of Constance. She sees him 
dead already in his captivity to John. She is dead in his 
death. Sorrow, only sorrow, passes by, as Constance 
crosses the stage ; and she calls on death, 

Misery's love, 
0, come to me. 

Was ever a sadder thing said in this sad world ! The full 
apostrophe to death may be said to be too fantastical — 

amiable lovely death ! 
Thou odoriferous stench ! sound rottenness ! 

It has the sound of madness, but it is only frenzy at its 

height playing with images. Were it madness, it would 

not at once be followed by those magnificent lines, charged 

with imaginative thought, invoking death — 

Arise forth from the couch of lasting night, 
Thou hate and terror to prosperity, 

nor by her close argument that she is not mad in answer 
to the Legate's accusation, nor by her clear consciousness 
that her wit is somewhat disordered, nor by the soft and 
piteous picture of her sorrow to the Cardinal and the 
King. On the verge of frenzy, she has as yet a clear 
mind. There is no madness in this speech, where sorrow 
and beauty live together — 

And, father Cardinal, I have heard you say 

That we shall see and know our friends in heaven : 

If that be true, I shall see my boy again ; 

For, since the birth of Cain, the first male child, 

To him that did but yesterday suspire, 

There was not such a gracious creature born. 

But now will canker sorrow eat my bud, 

And chase the native beauty from his cheek, 



250 



LECTURES ON SHAKESPEARE 



And he will look as hollow as a ghost, 

As dim and meagre as an ague's fit, 

And so he '11 die ; and, rising so again, 

When I shall meet him in the court of heaven 

I shall not know him : therefore never, never 

Must I behold my pretty Arthur more. 
Pand. You hold too heinous a respect of grief. 

Const. He talks to me that never had a son. 
K. Phil. You are as fond of grief as of your child. 
Const. Grief fills the room up of my absent child, 

Lies in his bed, walks up and down with me, 

Puts on his pretty looks, repeats his words, 

Kemembers me of all his gracious parts, 

Stuffs out his vacant garments with his form ; 

Then, have I reason to be fond of grief. 

Fare you well : had you such a loss as I, 

I could give better comfort than you do. 

I will not keep this form upon my head, 

When there is such disorder in my wit. 

Lord ! my boy, my Arthur, my fair son ! 

My life, my joy, my food, my all the world ! 

My widow-comfort, and my sorrows' cure ! 

With that in her heart, she could not live. She broke 
her heart and in a frenzy died. But before she dies, 
Shakespeare, by the words of King Philip, has adorned 
her image with beauty, and veiled it with pity. 

Bind up those tresses. 0, what love I note 
In the fair multitude of those her hairs ! 



Then, finally, judgment falls on John. The misfortune 
of his realm is doubled to him by the burning poison of 
which he dies. The last words he hears are of the ruin of 
his kingdom. He does not live to hear of its salvation. 
No words of death, of violent death, are more terrible, 
more poetic, more wild with imagination, than those of 
John in dying. 

P. Henry. How fares your majesty ? 

K. John. Poison' d, — ill fare — dead, forsook, cast off ; 
And none of you will bid the winter come 
To thrust his icy fingers in my maw, 
Nor let my kingdom's rivers take their course 



KING JOHN 251 

Through my burn'd bosom, nor entreat the north 
To make his bleak winds kiss my parched lips 
And comfort me with cold. I do not ask you much, 
I beg cold comfort ; and you are so strait 
And so ingrateful, you deny me that. 



IX 
HENEY IV 

Part I 

Henry IV., which must be considered as a single play, was 
divided by Shakespeare into two parts owing to its great 
length ; and the first part forms our subject. It and 
Henry V. are the completion of that great dramatic 
representation (as it were in one drama) of more than 
ninety years of English history, which, taking in all the 
civil wars of the Houses of York and Lancaster, was 
brought to its conclusion and catastrophe in Richard III. 

Richard II. and III. were written in 1592-3; Henry 
IV. and V. in 1596-7-8. Five years of constant work, 
practice, and development lay between them. It is easy 
to feel, as one compares the earlier with the later work, 
how much greater an artist Shakespeare was now than 
when he wrote the two Richard plays. The versification 
is fuller, almost rhymeless, weightier in sound, less un- 
equal, more carefully wrought, better poised, less barking 
than it is in Richard III., less femininely fluent than in 
Richard II In all the more dignified parts of the play 
it is as great in movement, music, pause and beat, as 
it is at any period of Shakespeare's life. He has now 
grasped and uses all the capabilities of his blank verse. 

Not only is the verse developed, but the matter. The 
poetry is charged with thought, both human on life, and 
philosophic by intuition. There is scarcely a line in the 
graver scenes which does not give us pause for thinking, 
for questioning; which does not lift the veil from some 

252 



HENRY IV 253 

movement of the soul, represent some turn of passion, or 
some scene of transient or continuous meditation in the 
secret chambers of the spirit. And this is done not only 
for a few characters, but for a host of various men, 
whose thoughts, whose turns and moods of feeling, whose 
circumstances, have been first observed with the keenest 
interest and pleasure, and then recorded with an imagina- 
tion, intelligence, and fineness of execution which is a 
constant and stimulating surprise. The execution is as 
fine as the observation is accurate. And there is added 
to all this that which great genius gives to its work — the 
personal spirit of the artist, which — proceeding from his 
silent conception and its attendant passion, and then from 
the outward form he has given to it — awakens and sets on 
fire the thought, imagination, and passion of the reader ; 
and continues to do this from generation to generation, 
as if it belonged to eternity, and was itself of an eternal 
power. As long as the human race endures will the great 
poet thus impress himself upon men, and teach them to 
understand and to love one another. Shakespeare had now 
reached the fulness of that power. But it was not till he 
came to write the three lovely comedies, which followed 
Henry IV. and V., and the mighty tragedies which 
followed those comedies, that he disclosed all that he 
could do with the fulness of that power. 

There was a further development which regards the his- 
torical plays alone. Shakespeare in Richard III. followed 
his Chronicles step by step. He did not reorganise the 
events for the sake of his drama with any artistic purpose. 
He bound himself down to the history, and shackled, so 
far, his imagination. Nor, save in one little scene in the 
streets (where he brought three London citizens together 
to talk of politics), did he pass in these Richard plays 
out of the circle of king and nobles, queens and princes, 
into other and lower scenes of human life. Nor does his 



254 LECTURES ON SHAKESPEARE 

work touch the common people, save in the garden scene 
in Richard II. He does not go outside of his Chronicle. 

But in Richard II. there is a change. In the develop- 
ment of Richard's character he does pass out of fact into 
bold invention. We know nothing from history of Richard 
emerging from the weakness and folly of a luxurious and 
light-minded King into a quiet steadiness and courage as 
he drew near to death ; nor have we any knowledge of his 
change into one whom we may call a wildered poet. The 
addition of impassioned poetic utterance to Richard the 
Second is a pure invention of Shakespeare's, and was 
done out of his own soul placing itself with poetic passion 
into Richard's character and circumstance. And the 
result is that this little King in whom the Muse of 
History takes but small interest, is made one of the most 
attractive characters in the history of England ; attractive 
not so much in himself, as in the problems of human 
nature which from his development by Shakespeare arise 
for explanation. 

Shakespeare had then begun to shake off the fetters 
of history. In King John, the next historical play, 
Shakespeare went further in this self-emancipation. He 
makes events and persons bow to his dramatic con- 
ception. He treats historical facts just as it pleases him 
as an artist to treat them. He makes persons alive who 
were dead, and those who were alive dead. He changes 
the age of Arthur. He laughs at the limits of time and 
place. What I wish, he seems to say, things to be for my 
artistic purpose, they shall be, — and they are. Neverthe- 
less, in King John, we are still wholly involved in the 
upper ranges of society and its many varieties. In only 
one scene does he break away for a few moments from 
the 'nobility.' The tale of Falconbridge, of his mother 
and brother, before he joins the court, touches the country 
life of England. 



HENRY IV 255 

Then comes Henry IV. In that play he is no longer, 
as in King John, reckless about historical fact. He clings 
quite fairly to the truth, though for the sake of his artistic 
contrast he makes Hotspur and the Prince of the same 
age. He emancipates himself from ' annalism ' in a differ- 
ent way. The slight touches we have had of men other 
than kings, barons, and legates, now develop into the 
creation of human life as it exists in the country, in the 
town, and in the camp. We are brought from the council 
chamber, where great princes, barons, bishops, and kings 
arrange affairs of State, to the Boar's Head Tavern, where 
Falstaff swills his sack with his train of drunken followers ; 
among ostlers and drawers and travelling chapmen, and 
thieves and harlots and discharged soldiers and watch- 
men. We are at home with the foolish and tender 
Hostess of the Inn, and we take pleasure, for the sake of 
FalstafFs wit, in scenes of low frolic and brawling. We 
are transferred from Gadshill to the wild north-country, 
where the rebels set their forces in array and the Welsh- 
men join the conspiracy. We touch the Scot in the 
Douglas, and the Celt in Glendower. We walk among 
the common soldiers, and hear their views of war and 
kings. We move among the captains and lieutenants. 
We are carried into the rustic life of the hamlets. We 
see the country magistrates and their sports and their 
foolish ways ; the ploughman, the cobbler, and the trades- 
man of the village; the starviDg beggars in rags whom 
Falstaff enlists. A host of names, not represented as 
characters in the play, are on the lips of the waiters and 
ostlers in London, in the talk of the squires and peasants 
of the village, and each of them is so touched in descrip- 
tion that we seem to know them. The range over human 
life is indefinitely extended. Shakespeare uses all the 
experience of his early days in the streets of London, and 
of his earlier life in the country about Stratford, to 



256 LECTURES ON SHAKESPEARE 

animate his play, to vary its representation of life, and to 
amuse his audience. He crowds this common life with 
incident, with characters, with thought set in action — and 
over all Falstarf presides, as much the king of this low 
whirl of humanity as Henry is of the court and the 
battlefield. 

It must have given Shakespeare the greatest pleasure 
when he threw off all the solemn restraints of history, 
and betook himself to pure invention ; when there opened 
out before his eager imagination the streets of the city, the 
plains and villages of the country, filled with the daily 
life of England. With what eagerness he used his power 
we may see in the creation of Falstaff, that triumph of 
imaginative and executive genius. The artist who made 
him was swimming on the wave-crest of good-humour. 

What Shakespeare (in thus adding common life to 
history) did for the ideal of true history was not realised 
by historians for some centuries. History continued to be 
for a long time only a narration of what courts and 
governments and policy did in war and peace. Only 
lately have some historians begun to realise that the 
doings, thoughts, and daily life of the burgher and the 
working-classes and of the poor of the country itself; of 
their ways and speech; above all, what the literature 
of England was and made, were also history, and not 
rarely more important history than the doings of states- 
men and armies. They might have learnt that lesson 
long before if they had only considered what Shakespeare 
has done in Henry IV. and Henry V. 

The play can scarcely be called a regular drama. It is, 
but not so plainly as Henry V., a dramatic representation 
in tableaux of a continuous series of events, taken from 
the latter years of Henry iv.'s life and ending with his 
death and the accession of his son to the throne. It 
has no plot, no central action, no invented complication 



HENRY IV 257 

towards a determined end. The representations, on the one 
hand, of the political life of the realm, and, on the other, of 
the low life of Windsor, Rochester, and London — of the 
court and of the people — are not welded together, as they 
should be in a regular drama. They are kept too separate 
for that. The many unconnected scenes would leave the 
drama without any unity, were it not for Prince Henry. 
His figure, his character, moving through both these 
representations of two kinds of life far apart from one 
another, and moving through both with an equal ease, 
links them and the play into a sort of unity. In all the 
scenes the one figure of the Prince is seen dominant. In 
a lesser way, Falstaff does the same kind of uniting work. 
He is fallen into base living with thieves and good-for- 
nothing fellows, drunkards, and ill-women, but he has been 
page to John of Gaunt at the court ; he is still admitted 
to Windsor, to the company of the great earls at war ; he 
is still a captain of the common soldiery. He too, even in 
his ruin, brings the separate parts of the drama together. 
Otherwise there is no union between the classes and the 
masses. We are not in a democratic country. In spite 
of Shakespeare's effort, we are not. But we are, in the 
play, in a country of Shakespeare's making, which is very 
likely to become democratic. The people, even the lowest 
of them, have got into history. This vague, half-realised 
position of Shakespeare's mind towards the people is the 
same in Julius Ccesar and in Coriolanus. 

The play begins; the first person who speaks is the 
King, and we understand in a moment what his life has 
been since we left him in Richard II. 

So shaken as we are, so wan with care, 
Find we a time for frighted peace to pant. 

England has been daubed with her own children's blood : 
acquaintance, kindred and allies, in civil butchery, have 

R 



258 LECTURES ON SHAKESPEARE 

been opposed each to each. A pause at last has come, and 
the King is not now the quick, eager, ambitious, stirring 
Bolingbroke we knew in the play of Richard II. — untiring 
in ardour and craft, bearing into his manhood the 
strength and energy of youth. He is worn with war, 
troubled, longing for rest, doubtful of his right, scalded 
with thoughts of all that he has done against his conscience 
for ambition, sore with the thought of the slaughter he 
has brought on England. 

What is his remedy ? It is to j oin the crusade ! A strange 
remedy ! to heal the curse of war by joining a new war ! 
These kings can never be quiet ; they do not think of let- 
ting the land rest, of letting their soldiers beat their swords 
into ploughshares. When they think at all of the people, 
they think of them as fodder — the burgher for cash, the 
peasant for battle. The nobles think the same — any- 
thing to have fighting, to pursue their only profession. 
When the great barons were not at war with the foreigner, 
they went to war with the king or with one another. 
They had nothing else to do. Even civil war was better 
than rusting in their castles, bored to death. Therefore, 
it was the policy of kings to make enemies abroad, and 
to employ their nobles, under them, in war outside the 
kingdom. And if Henry could not make a fighting 
claim on France, he hurried his earls to the Crusades. 
And he hid, in this latter case, his policy under the mask 
of religion. 

Henry makes his motive religious in words which have 
been quoted a thousand times — 

To chase these pagans in those holy fields 
Over whose acres walk'd those blessed feet, 
Which fourteen hundred years ago were nail'd 
For our advantage on the bitter cross. 

But his real motive was to employ his turbulent barons 
far from England — to make weak the elements of rebellion. 



HENRY IV 259 

Weary he was, but Shakespeare knows that his politic 
craft is as active as it had been of old. However — 
and with this the drama begins — he was not to have his 
crusading consolation. News comes that in the north 
Percy has conquered the Douglas ; but that he refuses 
to give up his prisoners to the King. That is, he and 
his father Northumberland attack the royal prerogative. 
Their message is almost a message of rebellion. Civil war 
is again at hand ; there is no peace for the King. And 
on the top of this, the evil life of his son is brought home 
to him by the contrast between the riot and disorder of 
the Prince and the noble report of Hotspur's fame. The 
heart of the King and of the father is broken with sorrow. 

On these two motives, his relation to the rebellion of 
the northern faction, and his relation to his son, the 
character of the King is developed by Shakespeare in this 
first part of the play. But, in order to complete the 
representation and to link the play back to that of 
Richard II. , the past character of Henry while he was 
yet Bolingbroke is carefully inserted into the drama by 
Shakespeare; and first, by the raging comment which 
Hotspur makes upon him. He is a king by murder, 
unjust, a canker in the state, a subtle, proud, vile poli- 
tician, a king of smiles, a fawning greyhound ; one who 
has fooled, discarded, and shook off with jeering and 
disdained contempt those who sacrificed their honour to 
place him on the throne. 

This is an enemy's view of his character. Hotspur 
backs it up, Act iv. Sc. 3, by a resume of Bolingbroke's 
first arrival in England after his exile, in which again the 
subtle craft of the King is insisted on, his slow crawling 
into more and more of power. He seemed to weep 

Over his country's wrongs ; and by this face, 
This seeming brow of justice, did he win 
The hearts of all that he did angle for ; 



260 LECTURES ON SHAKESPEARE 

and then he turned on those who had uplifted him, broke 

oath on oath, and drove them from the court. Worcester 

adds to the picture, and speaks straight to the King's face. 

He has broken his oaths, treated them as the cuckoo treats 

the sparrow, till 

By unkind usage, dangerous countenance, 
And violation of all faith and troth 

they have been forced into rebellion. 

Craft and soft words to win his goal, hardness of heart to 
keep what he has won, are part of Shakespeare's character 
of the King ; and now, in many a suggesting phrase, he 
adds to these elements a steady control of temper, which 
brings the King victory in the end, but which is an intense 
irritation to those enemies who, like Hotspur, cannot 
keep their temper. Then when the day is won, Henry is 
sketched as one who abandons with coolness those friends 
of the past who, even in small matters, now oppose his 
will. Moreover, he is as firm-fixed as a rock to keep what 
he has won, by craft if possible, if not, by fearless battle. 
Then he is made liable, in spite of his calm subtlety, to 
sudden impolitic rages, such as we have marked in the 
Bolingbroke of Richard II., at any infringement of his 
privileges or his will. Yet, when the fury has broken out, 
he is able to repress his anger for the sake of policy, and 
now, in his old age, for the sake of bringing peace to his 
distracted and world-worn life. He turns to Worcester 
before the battle of Shrewsbury, and offers full forgiveness. 
This is a character much mingled, but which never wants 
for a firm and self- mastering will, driving all the King's 
powers to his chosen goal. Such is Henry painted by 
Shakespeare in the colours of his enemies. 

But we are not left with that picture only. Shake- 
speare, with his infinite care to complete his drawing, 
makes Henry himself paint for his son his past career, and 
at the same time connect this play with that of Richard II. 



HENRY IV 261 

' I was not, as you, my son, have made yourself, common- 
hackneyed in the eyes of men, stale and cheap to vulgar 
company ' : 

But like a comet I was wonder'd at ; 

That men would tell their children ' This is he ! ' 

He praises himself in contrast with Richard, but Shake- 
speare makes plain the contrast between the dissembling 
of the King and the open boldness of the Prince. The 
contrast is vivid ; and there is something of the irony of 
Shakespeare in the King pressing upon his son the 
imitation of that part of his character which was the chief 
cause of his quarrels with the nobles, and in afterwards 
advising him to be like Hotspur, whose character was the 
very opposite at all points of that of the King. It really 
reads as if, in his despair of his son, Henry did not know 
what to say or to do. Then, in that interview of the third 
Act, alone with his son, the King's craft fails him, or is 
forgotten in his fatherhood. Shakespeare, in his love of 
natural piety, brings into clearness the common emotions 
of a father's heart, and we see the subtle King no more. 
We forget, as we listen, the baseness of his politic play to 
win and keep the crown, even while the words in which he 
recommends such subtlety to his son are still in our ears. 
That his tenderness should be foolish and bring tears to 
his eyes, uplifts his character. Nor in the second part of 
the play does Shakespeare cease to dwell on this. We 
part in peace from Henry, because he loves. Then too, 
and this adds dignity to his affection, he is jealous for his 
son's honour. ' Think of what Percy has done, of the 
fame he has already won. Think how I feel when I 
hear of your low and fameless life, you who are my 
dearest enemy and ought to be my dearest friend.' The 
Prince answers he will so deal with Percy, if the King 
will forgive, that all his honours shall be his ; and Henry 
in a burst of trust and joy, as natural then, as it is 



262 LECTURES ON SHAKESPEARE 

generally apart from his cautious character, forgives, 
forgets, and is happy 

A hundred thousand rebels die in this : — 

Thou shalt have charge, and sovereign trust herein. 

The whole scene is a piece of pure and subtilised nature — 
the very utterance of a king and a father. 

Henry, dealing with the rebels, is quite different from 
this vision of himself as a father moved, below the crafty 
surface, by natural affection. He is bold, rough, peremp- 
tory, to Worcester, Hotspur, and Northumberland, dis- 
misses them abruptly, will not even hear them ; a king 
determined to be a king. In patience he has been smooth 
as oil. Now, wearied, patience has passed into impatient 

pride. 

Worcester, get thee gone ; for I do see 

Danger and disobedience in thine eye : 

O, sir, your presence is too bold and peremptory, 

And majesty might never yet endure 

The moody frontier of a servant brow. 

This is his hot temper, jealous of his rights and privilege, 
and it lasts all through his interview in the first Act with 
Northumberland. He will not give a farthing to ransom 
Mortimer. ' Let him starve upon the barren mountains. 
He has revolted, let him die. You tell me he fought 
valiantly with Glendower. You belie him, Percy; he 
never fought ; he durst as well have met the devil. Speak 
of him no more, and 

Send me your prisoners with the speediest means, 
Or you shall hear in such a kind from me 
As will displease you. 5 

A strong king — resolute to defy his barons, to open the 
gates of war ; as fearless as he was crafty. Yet, when the 
battle is set in array, he offers the gentlest terms, uncon- 
ditional pardon, kind consideration of their griefs. But 
his craft, and half- lying, and disloyalty to his word have 



HENRY IV 263 

been so great in the past that Worcester and Vernon cannot 
believe in his kindness or his truth. Wherefore, he is one of 
those men who, good on one side, and ill on another, finds 
his good rendered incapable by his ill, and his ill strength- 
ened by his good. All his life is a weary war for want 
of resolving plainly to be all open-hearted or all crafty. 
Though he has won his power by solid will, and keeps 
it by the same solidity of will, the subtlety of the man, 
mixing itself with his will, enters into his policy and his 
conscience, and makes him waver at times in action ; 
and this wavering prevents him from being understood. 
Men think they will get round his will, think that he is 
afraid, think that he does not know his own mind — and 
to rebel against him, and to conquer him, seems easy. It 
only seems so ; Henry can always unsubtilise himself into 
resolute action. 

Prince Henry is as finely delineated as his father, and is, 
perhaps, more interesting. The difference between them 
is so radical, that it is only at intervals that they meet in 
peace. The son separates himself from his father because 
he understands his father's character and is out of 
harmony with it. The father feels apart from the son 
because he does not understand his son's character. Then 
the King is old before his time, mustering his forces with 
difficulty to face his trouble, longing for peace; but the 
Prince is passionately young, unwearied as an eagle, and 
to rest seems to him to die. There is too great a space 
of feeling between him and his father for them to live 
together, save in time of war when in action they are 
united. 

Such a young fellow would be bored by a court full of 
ceremony, alive with intrigue, with solemn persons about 
him like Westmoreland and Blunt. He might be driven 
into riot and folly — anything in which he might employ 
his surplus force, expend the torrent of his blood, 



264 LECTURES ON SHAKESPEARE 

which, checked, would make him ill. And this is what 
Shakespeare meant. If the Prince could not find legiti- 
mate means for this overflow of youthful blood in war, 
he would disperse it by illegitimate means; and he 
found these means in a life so low for a prince that all 
the world wondered. But then the world did not know 
the attractiveness of Falstaff to one who, like Prince 
Henry, loved intelligence and wit, and loved them all the 
more because they were so surprisingly bound up with 
sensuality, drunkenness, and folly. This was just the 
combination which would please a young man like 
Henry, greedy of sensation in his youth. The high 
ceremonial life of the court sickened his energies, and 
wearied him to the marrow. 

Some say he had no craft in the play, that nothing of 
his father was in him. But that is unlikely. There 
ought to be a shade at least of heredity in him ; and 
Shakespeare, who is often an hereditarian, does not forget 
this. He marks it in the Prince's first soliloquy. Falstaff 
has no sooner left him, Poins has no sooner induced him 
to join in robbing the merchants, he has no sooner played 
completely up to their rascality, than he speaks to himself : 

I know you all, and will awhile uphold 

The unyoked humour of your idleness ; 

Yet herein will I imitate the sun, 

Who doth permit the base contagious clouds 

To smother up his beauty from the world, 

That, when he please again to be himself, 

Being wanted, he may be more wonder'd at, 

By breaking through the foul and ugly mists 

Of vapours that did seem to strangle him. 

If all the year were playing holidays, 

To sport would be as tedious as to work ; 

But when they seldom come, they wish'd for come, 

And nothing pleaseth but rare accidents. 

So when this loose behaviour I throw off 

And pay the debt I never promised, 

By how much better than my word I am, 

By so much shall I falsify men's hopes ; 



HENRY IV 265 

And like bright metal on a sullen ground, 
My reformation, glittering o'er my fault, 
Shall show more goodly and attract more eyes 
Than that which have no foil to set it off. 
I '11 so offend, to make offence a skill ; 
Eedeeming time when men think least I will. 

This is crafty enough. He has already settled his aim in 
life beyond these follies, and with all the cool deliberation 
of his father. He wears disorder on the surface ; below, 
all is planned. Meanwhile he will have his amusement — 
the 'rare accidents of life' which please and satisfy his 
youthful blood. He takes that amusement strangely, and 
in a society so far removed from that of his rank and 
breeding, that it seems as if he desired to wash every 
memory of them out of his mind. And he does this well, 
with his native eagerness, quite as if he enjoyed it greatly. 
He makes himself at home with Mrs. Quickly and Poins 
and the servants of the Inn. Put him anywhere and he 
flings himself into the heart of the situation — a drinking 
bout with Falstaff, or the battlefield at Shrewsbury. This 
pliant activity of youth is matched with an intelligence 
as quick and pliant. He can speak on the cares of the 
kingdom with his father, in counsel with his fellow-nobles 
concerning the war, and with equal ease and mastery in 
a low public-house among riotous thieves and drunkards. 
He loves to match himself in a battle of wits with 
Falstaff, and he is often as quick and witty as Falstaff. 
His intelligence is flashing, and he companies with Falstaff 
for the sake of his intelligence. 

But this was only half the man. When legitimate 
means for the using of youthful energy were afforded him 
by war, Shakespeare sends him into it like a fire into a 
dry wood. All his folly is as if it had never been. The 
companion of Falstaff gives way to Prince Henry ; and it 
is the real Henry whom we meet, the chivalric, courteous, 
quick-fighting, resolute, intelligent, grave-considering 



266 LECTURES ON SHAKESPEARE 

young knight, from plume to spur one star of battle, the 
victor of Agincourt in the flush of his youth. Shake- 
speare marks this by the vividness of his description — 

I saw young Harry, with his beaver on, 
His cuisses on his thighs, gallantly arm'd, 
Eise from the ground like feather'd Mercury, 
And vaulted with such ease into his seat, 
As if an angel dropp'd down from the clouds, 
To turn and wind a fiery Pegasus, 
And witch the world with noble horsemanship. 

He rescues his father in the battle and slays his rival 
Percy. Who is more gallant, more at home in war ? His 
courtesy, as a chivalrous knight, is as great as his courage 
and skill in arms; and his courage and skill are as 
strange and wonderful to his foes and friends as 
his riotous life had been. His challenge to Percy 
is couched in words so gracious, modest, honourable, 
so full of his enemy's praise, that Vernon who heard it 
told Percy that England did never wear so sweet a hope 
as it had in Harry, Prince of Wales. To read the challenge, 
Act v. Sc. 2, and to read Vernon's report of the challenge, 
is to understand what Shakespeare meant Henry to be 
below his mask. Nor does he yet — in this first part — 
leave his picture without a further touch. When we hear 
him, over the corpse of his foe, bid him farewell, we are 
made to feel how much serious observation of life, how 
grave a consideration of it, lay underneath the outside of 
the man who rioted with Falstaff and his crew. 1 

Fare thee well, great heart ! 
Ill-weaved ambition, how much art thou shrunk ! 
When that this body did contain a spirit, 
A kingdom for it was too small a bound ; 
But now two paces of the vilest earth 
Is room enough : this earth that bears thee dead 
Bears not alive so stout a'gentleman. 

1 This impression is deepened by his farewell to Falstaff, whom he 
supposes to be dead on the battlefield. 



HENRY IV 267 

This is the picture, and it is hard to match it with the 
other Prince who plays the highwayman at Rochester. 

At the root of both aspects of the man, and explaining 
both, is the effervescence of youth. In peace, when there 
is nothing to do, he will fling himself into folly that he 
may feel his life; in war, his name is chivalry. He is 
an outsider in folly, he is an insider in war. Nor does 
he ever forget, even in his worse rioting, much less in 
the wars, his kingship near at hand. He knows exactly 
what he will do. Within the wild youth there is a steady, 
determined, almost an icy will; a cool prudence, an ex- 
perience of men stored up for use, a self-knowledge and 
self-control, which are at all points so strangely different 
from the qualities he has shown to the world, that, when 
they emerge, they surprise all men of his own class into 
admiration and delight. 

This is Shakespeare's conception of the man, whom he 
will complete in Henry V., and from point to point of 
this play he marks it carefully, till the hour when the 
transformation takes place, and the play is ended. With 
what judgment, with what an equal pencil, he draws this 
picture, I need not describe. 

It is with some pleasure that we turn from Henry 
to Hotspur. They are set in knightly contrast. At 
the beginning the King compares the warlike fame of 
Percy with the unwarlike riot of the Prince. But the 
Prince proves that he is a better warrior than Percy, 
and that comparison ends. The real contrast is in 
character. We turn, I have said, with some pleasure 
from Henry to Percy, because, conscious of the cold 
prudence of the Prince hidden under his imprudent 
life, we are glad to company with a bold, frank, hot- 
tempered, reckless, true-speaking creature like Hotspur, 
who has no craft in him at all. For a time we are 
pleased, but, when we have been Percy's comrade for 



268 LECTURES ON SHAKESPEARE 

a little, and find no foresight in him, no self-control, no 
thought, no use of experience, no judgment; only animal 
courage, passion for fame, chivalrous joy in battle, little 
thought for others, even for his wife ; small respect for 
his elders, the intelligence of a fighting-cock alone, a 
courtesy which is lost at once when he is bored, as he 
is with Glendower — we begin to lose something of our 
pleasure. He is not much more than a great-couraged, 
warm-blooded noble, with a furious temper, and an inordi- 
nate self-consideration ; wholly incapable of leading men 
or keeping them together. Had he come to England's 
throne as the King wished, he had never united the 
barons, or won the field at Agincourt. There are only a 
few men like the Prince in an army, who have equal 
intelligence and bravery, craft and frankness. There are 
hundreds of men like Percy ; men of the greatest use in 
battle when they are well led, and forced to be obedient 
to leaders; but who, when they lead, destroy armies, 
irritate their men, and lose campaigns. That is the real 
contrast Shakespeare made ; and I think he deliberately 
exaggerated a little his picture of Hotspur. It is just as 
well that the character should be, as it were, idealised. 
Its faults will then be clear, as well as its excellences. 

Hotspur first appears in that famous speech where he 
describes his irritation at meeting a court fop on the field 
of battle; but we have heard before of his warrior-fame. 
His defence of Mortimer is full of a soldier's passion, and 
a soldier's friendship, audacious in its contradiction of the 
King. And he lashes even the quietude of the King into 
anger. When the King leaves the room, having demanded 
Hotspur's prisoners — 

An if the devil come and roar for them, 
I will not send them : I 'will after straight 
And tell him so ; for I will ease my heart, 
Albeit I make a hazard of my head. 
North. What ! drunk with choler ? stay and pause a while : 
Here comes your uncle. 



HENRY IV 269 

Neither his uncle nor his father can bring prudence to 
lower his anger. He mocks and scorns the King. He 
will have vengeance on him. Then his uncle speaks of a 
plot with danger in it. The word danger changes his 
swift mood. 'Danger! danger! that is mine — danger 
brings honour with it; all for honour!' And he is as 
wild in speech for honour as he has been for anger — 

By heaven, methinks, it were an easy leap, 

To pluck bright honour from the pale-faced moon, 

Or dive into the bottom of the deep, 

Where fathom-line could never touch the ground, 

And pluck up drowned honour by the locks ; 

An instant passes and he leaves that cry, and shouts a 
new defiance to the King. Absorbed in his fighting 
wrath, he listens to nothing his elders say, nothing 

Save how to gall and pinch this Bolingbroke. 

Northumberland, his father, is puffed away by him, but 
marks his folly with some scorn — 

Imagination of some great exploit 

Drives him beyond the bounds of patience. 

Worcester bids him farewell till he can control himself 
and listen. His father cries out upon him — 

Why, what a wasp-stung and impatient fool 
Art thou to break into this woman's mood, 
Tying thine ear to no tongue but thine own ! 

At last, he listens, but as he hears of the conspiracy, he 
imagines it is already brought to its close. Before the 
game 's afoot, he lets slip the hounds upon it. This is not 
the man to match himself with the cool and foreseeing 
King, with the concealed wisdom of the Prince. 

All for war, nothing for policy, is Hotspur. He dreams 
of battle till the sweat stands on his brow. He starts 
when he sits alone. He murmurs tales of iron war. His 
wife speaks to him; he does not listen, but calls his 
servants to bring his horse. She asks him if he love her. 



270 LECTURES ON SHAKESPEARE 

' Away,' he cries, ' away, you trifler ! — Love ? I love thee not. 

When I'm on horseback 111 swear I love thee infinitely.' 

He mocks her, but with good humour — 

constant you are, 
But yet a woman : and for secrecy, 
No lady closer ; for I well believe 
Thou wilt not utter what thou dost not know ; 
And so far will I trust thee, gentle Kate. 

Then he is brought face to face with Glendower, the 

wizard Welshman. He is infinitely bored with his 

pretensions to magic, with his poetic phraseology, with 

his music. He meets the magical business as Huxley 

would have met a spiritualist. When Glendower says he 

framed to the harp many an English ditty lovely well, 

and that Hotspur never had this virtue ; he answers, as 

good scorners of poetry answer — 

And I am glad of it with all my heart : 

I had rather be a kitten and cry mew 

Than one of these same metre ballad-mongers. 

Nothing sets my teeth on edge so much as mincing 
poetry. As to the skimble-skamble stuff Glendower talks 
for hours about Merlin and the prophecies, dragons and 
griffins, couching lions and rampant cats, and all the 
devils' names that were his lackeys — I mark him not a 

word. 

I had rather live 
With cheese and garlic in a windmill, far, 
Than feed on cates and have him talk to me 
In any summer-house in Christendom. 

He puts Glendower, by this scornfulness and impatience, 

past patience. Yet Glendower is a chief limb of his 

enterprise, whom Prince Henry would have soothed and 

flattered and made his own. And Worcester blames him 

heavily for this ; and sums him up — 

You must needs learn, lord, to amend this fault ; 
Though sometimes it show greatness, courage, blood, — 
And that 's the dearest grace it renders you, — 
Yet oftentimes it doth present harsh rage, 



HENRY IY 271 

Defect of manners, want of government, 
Pride, haughtiness, opinion, and disdain : 
The least of which haunting a nobleman 
Loseth men's hearts, and leaves behind a stain 
Upon the beauty of all parts besides, 
Beguiling them of commendation. 
Hot. Well, I am school'd : good manners be your speed ! 

Fit for fighting, fit for nothing else ; }^et he is lovable 
enough. When we meet him on the day of the fight, he 
is in his true element. War quiets him, and he speaks 
well and statelily. 

gentlemen, the time of life is short ! 

To spend that shortness basely were too long, 

If life did ride upon a dial's point, 

Still ending at the arrival of an hour. 

An if we live, we live to tread on kings ; 

If die, brave death, when princes die with us ! 

It is sorrow when this bold youthfulness meets death, and 
at the hand of his rival. Yet he leaves the world nobly, 
and a moment's thoughtfulness irradiates his unthinking 
soul in death. 

0, Harry, thou hast robb'd me of my youth ! 

I better brook the loss of brittle life 

Than those proud titles thou hast won of me ; 

They wound my thoughts worse than thy sword my flesh : 

But thought 's the slave of life, and life time's fool ; 

And time, that takes survey of all the world, 

Must have a stop. 0, I could prophesy, 

But that the earthy and cold hand of death 

Lies on my tongue. 

Only in death to look forward, to have only then the gift 
of prophecy, only then to live beyond the present, only then 
to feel that thought should master life, and life be not the 
fool of time — that was very pitiful. I wish he had fought 
at Agincourt. 

At least, he had the courage of his opinions. Not so 
Northumberland, his father. He is another of Shake- 
speare's delineations of one who lets C I dare not wait 
upon I would.' Perhaps the constant presence with him 



272 LECTURES ON SHAKESPEARE 

of such a firebrand of impetuosity as his son slowly 
drove him back into a cautiousness which bordered on 
fear; and in this he is quite unlike his character m 
Richard II. He was then strong, or seemed to be strong ; 
now he has grown into weakness. He goes to bed, sick 
he says, and sends a sort of medical certificate, when he 
ought to be in the rebel camp. 'He could not get his 
friends together, the thing was dangerous, but do you, 
my son, go on, and make the attempt.' This is the plea 
of a man half-drugged with the fears of age. Percy is 
indignant with his father, but it is a piece of his chivalry 
that he defends his father before the world. But his 
father's defection dismays the rebellion, and is its defeat. 
This sketch of Shakespeare's, as we shall see, is worked 
out afterwards into a complete picture. 

Then there is Glendower. It is curious to read Shake- 
speare's little study of the Celt. I do not know whence he 
derived his materials, but the representation is so remark- 
ably apart from the English character, and so sharply 
contrasted with Hotspur — the sturdy and contemptuous 
Englishman of the North — that I imagine he amused 
himself by clashing them together in Hotspur and 
Glendower; exaggerating the dividing qualities of both, 
or rather, making them exaggerate each his own national 
qualities. Every word Glendower says irritates Hotspur 
into scornful speech. Every word Hotspur says makes 
Glendower feel that this Englishman thinks him a man 
self-deceived, a fool to believe in himself, and if not a 
conscious, yet an unconscious liar. This apposition of 
two national characters, each driven by the other into 
angry opposition, is a curious thing to find. It is, as it 
were, a picture-prophecy of English and Irish in contact 
— each in extreme — even to the present day. 

Glendower is full of pride, derived from his magic 
power. He believes in his own magic. The heaven was 



HENRY IV 273 

full of fiery shapes when he was born. Extraordinary- 
signs have marked him from mankind. He can call 
spirits from the vasty deep. Then he has the Celtic 
eloquence concerning Nature. His talk is full of sounding 
adjectives, of phrases more fanciful than imaginative. 

The hour before the heavenly-harnessed team 
Begins his golden progress in the east. 

He is a poet and a harpist ; makes English ditties quite 
1 lovely and sleep-inducing.' He calls for music, and the 
musicians hang in the air a thousand leagues away, and 
come at his powerful word to please his guests. As I 
read, I seem to company with some Celtic persons I 
have known. And as I read Hotspur's answers I seem 
to company with rough squires, or scornful scientific 
English persons, whom also 1 have known. Shakespeare, 
in this dialogue, has brought into clash two tempera- 
ments which exist everywhere in opposition ; and he has 
exaggerated both, I fancy, for his own amusement, and 
for ours. 



HENRY IV 

Part II 

The second part of Henry IV. (written 1598-9) opens 
at Warkworth Castle, 'this worm-eaten hold of ragged 
stone/ where the Earl of Northumberland is waiting 
for news of the battle of Shrewsbury. He, saving his 
skin, has deserted his brothers in rebellion, and been false 
to his son — ' crafty-sick,' when he should have been sick of 
craft. It is curious how the whole set of those who of old 
accompanied Henry iv. are represented by Shakespeare 
as attracted by the King's example into craft as the 
guard and guide of life and policy. Northumberland 
practises it even on his own son who is the very antithesis 
of craft. Hotspur hates it, specially in his father. 

Henry iv. combines a strong will with craft — a powerful 
combination; but Northumberland combines it with 
weakness of will, and ruins the rebellion by his vacillating 
fear. A flux of words charged with poetic sentiment is, 
in Shakespeare, one proof of weakness of character. He 
added it to Richard u., he adds it here to Northumberland. 
News comes to the Earl that his side has won the battle ; 
then a vague report that it may be lost; and finally a 
clear report that his son is dead, Douglas taken, and his 
fellow-rebels executed. All through the scene, which is 
most dramatically managed, Northumberland unpacks 
his senile soul with words full of poetic illustrations. He 
is a master of metaphors. 

The times are wild ; contention, like a horse 
Full of high feeding, madly hath broke loose 
And bears down all before him. 

274 



HENRY IV 275 

When the messenger with bad news comes in, he is 

content with two metaphors — 

Yea, this man's brow, like to a title-leaf, 
Foretells the nature of a tragic volume : 
So looks the strond whereon the imperious Hood 
Hath left a witness'd usurpation. 



Again- 



Even such a man, so faint, so spiritless, 

So dull, so dead in look, so woe-begone, 

Drew Priam's curtain in the dead of night, 

And would have told him half his Troy was burn'd, 

But Priam found the fire ere he his tongue, 

And I my Percy's death ere thou report'st it. 



Again — 



the first bringer of unwelcome news 
Hath but a losing office, and his tongue 
Sounds ever after as a sullen bell, 
Remember'd tolling a departed friend. 

Then, when Northumberland hears the whole tale of ruin, 

he says he is like a fevered man who, impatient of his 

feeble fit, breaks like a fire out of his keeper's arms, and 

1 weakened with grief, is now enraged with grief.' Then 

his issue of words turns to violence of words. He 

shouts and cries; calls on Nature to upturn itself in 

sympathy with his sorrows. Feeble bluster is in every 

word. It is senility run riot. 

Let heaven kiss earth ! now let not Nature's hand 
Keep the wild flood confined ! let order die ! 
And let this world no longer be a stage 
To feed contention in a lingering act ; 
But let one spirit of the first-born Cain 
Reign in all bosoms, that, each heart being set 
On bloody courses, the rude scene may end, 
And darkness be the burier of the dead ! 

No wonder Travers said when he heard this — 
This strained passion doth you wrong, my lord. 

No wonder, after the exhaustion of this fruitless blether, 
Northumberland calmed down — and began to think of 
running away into safety. 



276 LECTURES ON SHAKESPEARE 

His interview with Lady Percy, in the second Act, 
underlines all these weaknesses. He will go to the war he 
says ; his honour drives him. But his son's wife, full of 
scorn, tells him he has already forfeited his honour when 
his son looked northward in vain for his father, and when 
he, the father, broke his word to his son. And when she 
says, ' Save yourself and us, there is no need to trouble 
about honour now,' he is at once persuaded and flies to 
Scotland — but he does not leave without his metaphor : 

'Tis with my mind, 
As with the tide swelPd up unto his height, 
That makes a still-stand, running neither way. 

When we hear this and all the other empty phrases made 

when acts were needed, we are ready to say with Hotspur 

Nothing sets my teeth on edge so much as mincing poetry. 

At last, this admirable sketch is closed by the contempt of 
the Archbishop of York acquainting the rebel lords that 
he has received letters from the Earl of Northumberland. 

Their cold intent, tenour and substance, thus : 
Here doth he wish his person, with such powers 
As might hold sortance with his quality, 
The which he could not levy ; whereupon 
He is retired, to ripe his growing fortunes, 
To Scotland : and concludes in hearty prayers, 
That your attempts may overlive the hazard 
And fearful meeting of their opposite. 

'Twere better he had died then than touched so deep a 
dishonour. 

I turn to the King and the Prince. When we meet 
them again they are no longer at one as they were in the 
activities of war. The Prince, weary of the dull court, 
has again gone back to riot with Falstaff — and to his 
study of men ; and the King is left without his eldest 
son to help his sorrows or share his care for England. 

In the fifth scene, when he comes on the stage in his 
nightgown, we are shown his heart by Shakespeare. In 



HENRY IV 277 

a famous passage we hear his apostrophe to Sleep. ' Why- 
dost thou fly the eyelids of a king and close the beggar's 
and the ship-boy's eyes V It is too long to quote, but 
beauty and nobility meet in its poetry. As we read it 
we think with pity how tired the strong man has become ; 
how changed from the Bolingbroke of old ! He is like his 
father Gaunt, when Gaunt, worn with life, laid himself 
down to die. Did he think, as he spoke, of the days 
when he met his father's cool philosophy with a young 
man's passion ? Did he picture himself and his son, who 
was now as fiery as he had been of old ? All that he asks 
now of life is rest ; and rest he cannot have, save the rest 
of death. And then his thoughts turn from himself to 
his kingdom, and to its fate when he is dead and his wild 
son succeeds him. He speaks of this to Warwick and 
Surrey ; he recalls the far-off days, and Richard's unhappy 
fall, and the civil fates that followed, and the prophecy 
Richard made of old that Northumberland would break 
up his league with him and divide the kingdom into war. 
1 God ! ' he cries, ' had I but known then all the peril, all 
the trouble, all the blows of conscience, all the friendships 
broken, I had sooner died.' He puts this into words, full 
of his grave intelligence, full of that observation of natural 
law which one traces so often in Shakespeare. A geolo- 
gist might use the words : 

God ! that one might read the book of fate, 

And see the revolution of the times 

Make mountains level, and the continent, 

Weary of solid firmness, melt itself 

Into the sea ! and, other times, to see 

The beachy girdle of the ocean 

Too wide for Neptune's hips ; how chances mock, 

And changes fill the cup of alteration 

With divers liquors. 0, if this were seen, 

The happiest youth, viewing his progress through, 

What perils past, what crosses to ensue, 

Would shut the book, and sit him down and die. 



278 LECTURES ON SHAKESPEARE 

Warwick does not answer this despondency. But he 
does answer the King's wonder at Richard's prophecy- 
being true: and the answer reveals the philosophic 
atmosphere of the court which Prince Henry was bored 
with; and the philosophic thought which Shakespeare 
himself had begun to cherish in his work. 

There is a history in all men's lives, 

Figuring the nature of the times deceased ; 

The which observed, a man may prophesy, 

With a near aim, of the main chance of things 

As yet not come to life ; which in their seeds 

And weak beginnings lie intreasured. 

Such things become the hatch and brood of time. 

The King does not care for the explanation, but something 
in the words rouses his brave spirit. The weakness of age 
and disease slips from him. His soul is, in its recesses, 
always strong. He is like his father Gaunt and his son 
in that. ' Are these things, then,' he cries, ' necessities ? 
Then let us meet them like necessities ' ; and he turns to 
present war. 

When we next meet the King, in this careful and 
delicate picture of him, the rebellion is at an end, and his 
thoughts are now wrapt round his son, and what will 
become of the kingdom when his son succeeds. He loves 
the boy who fought so well at Shrewsbury. And, moved 
by this inward love, he paints the Prince in brighter 
colours ; he is gracious, says the King, if he be observed — 

He hath a tear for pity, and a hand 

Open as day for melting charity : 

Yet, notwithstanding, being incensed, he 's flint ; 

As humorous as winter, and as sudden 

As flaws congealed in the spring of day. 

His temper, therefore, must be well observed : 

Chide him for faults, and do it reverently, 

When you perceive his blood inclined to mirth ; 

But, being moody, give him line and scope, 

Till that his passions, like a whale on ground, 

Confound themselves with working. 



HENRY IY 279 

Could any lines show clearer understanding of what was 
on the surface of the Prince, and clearer misunderstanding 
of the depths of his character ? Yet, he has little hope. 
O what, he thinks, will not England suffer from my son ! 
Warwick sees more clearly. The Prince, he says, is 
studying humanity. He is like a man who, learning a 
strange tongue, must needs learn the grossest words as 
well as the best, that he may know the whole of the 
language; but, having known them, he will not use 
them ; he will even hate them. 

So, like gross terms, 
The prince will in the perfectness of time 
Cast off his followers ; 

but he will know mankind, its evil as well as its good ; 
and will love the good the more, measuring it by the 
evil he has seen. This excuse then is invented by 
Shakespeare for the riotous life of the Prince. He is 
studying — for use as a king — all sides of human nature. 
And if Shakespeare himself had been accused, as he was, 
of having lived as riotous a life as the Prince, that is the 
excuse he would have made : ' I have studied man.' 

While the King and Warwick thus speak, Westmore- 
land enters with the news that peace is full in England. 
It is too late a boon to save the King ; the hand of death 
is at his heart. The phrase in which he tells his friends 
that good news is too late for him is so poetic on the lips 
of this grave King, that it seems as if coming death had 
changed the practical into the imaginative man. When 
the soul is close to departure, its imaginative powers 
break through the crust and begin to show what they 
will be. These words are strange in the mouth of the 
King, as strange as his apostrophe to Sleep — 

Westmoreland, thou art a summer bird, 
Which ever in the haunch of winter sings 
The lifting up of day. 



280 LECTURES ON SHAKESPEARE 

The King faints, and Clarence cries — 

The incessant care and labour of his mind 

Hath wrought the mure, that should confine it in, 

So thin, that life looks through and will break out. 

And now Shakespeare brings the father and son to under- 
stand one another. In life they never could have seen 
each the other's heart. Their two temperaments were 
like flint and steel; when they met sparks flew and fire 
blazed. But when death took all the fire from the flint, 
and these two knew they could never meet again, the 
lovingness in both brought them together. It is a famous 
scene, and the mingling in it of their personal lovingness 
and of their political craft — so natural to both of them — 
is done with a delightful skill by Shakespeare. They are 
quite affectionate, and quite worldly minded. And indeed 
they were bound to be men of the world. Their kingdom 
was in mortal danger. Their path needed the wariest, the 
craftiest walking. And whatever their differences were — 
one thing was first with both of them — they were deter- 
mined, at all costs, to secure their crown. On the means 
for that aim, the end of their last talk turns exclusively. 
They see one another clearly, in this last lonely converse ; 
and it marks Shakespeare's careful art that even in the 
pity and pathos of this scene he is not led away by the 
sentiment of the moment to ignore the worldly craft in 
which their characters are at one. 

At another point also he brings them together. Both 
are sorely troubled by the cares, the demands, the unrest 
of Kingship. This underlies the King's life ; it kills him 
in the end. The Prince's apostrophe to the crown in this 
scene, his accusation of it as the murderer of his father, 
dwell on the same thought. He is full of it in Henry V. 
before the battle of Agincourt. The Prince, however, is 
able for the strife, and assumes, with steadfast resolution, 
the crown and all its troubles. The King puts by the 



HENRY IV 281 

crown, unable for its cares. He is old, the Prince is 
young. Nevertheless — for all the fire of youth — the 
Prince feels the burden of imperial duties. He is not 
the character to fling them to the dogs of riot, as Falstaff 
thinks he is. They press him into action, but when the 
image of the long stress and pain of kingship steals in 
this quiet hour on his imagination, the desire of rest, the 
comfort of sleep, steal also into his thoughts. What his 
father feels in reality, he feels in prophetic fancy. Hence 
it is that Shakespeare has brought them both together 
very graciously in a common invocation to sleep, in the 
contrast they both make between the sleeplessness of a 
King and the unbroken rest of the peasant. I quote the 
Prince's soliloquy as he sits by the bed of the dying 
King. It repeats the motive of the King's soliloquy in 
the previous Act; and, at the same time, Shakespeare 
develops in it not only the tenderness but also the royal 
pride of the Prince's character — 

Why doth the crown lie there upon his pillow, 
Being so troublesome a bedfellow ? 
polish'd perturbation ! golden care ! 
That keep'st the ports of slumber open wide 
To many a watchful night ! Sleep with it now ! 
Yet not so sound and half so deeply sweet 
As he whose brow with homely biggen bound 
Snores out the watch of night. majesty ! 
When thou dost pinch thy bearer, thou dost sit 
Like a rich armour worn in heat of day, 
That scalds with safety. By his gates of breath 
There lies a downy feather which stirs not : 
Did he suspire, that light and weightless down 
Perforce must move. 

My gracious lord ! my father ! 
This sleep is sound indeed ; this is a sleep, 
That from this golden rigol hath divorced 
So many English kings. 

Thy due from me 
Is tears and heavy sorrows of the blood, 
Which nature, love, and filial tenderness, 
Shall, dear father, pay thee plenteously : 



282 LECTURES ON SHAKESPEARE 

My due from thee is this imperial crown, 

Which, as immediate from thy place and blood, 

Derives itself to me. Lo, here it sits, 

Which God shall guard : and put the whole world's strength 

Into one giant arm, it shall not force 

This lineal honour from me ; this from thee 

Will I to mine leave, as 'tis left to me. 

[Exit with the crown. 

The King wakes, asks for the crown, and thinks the 
Prince has, in his greed for it, not waited for his father's 
death — 

I stay too long for thee, I weary thee. 

It is a difficult conversation to invent, and it is wonderful 
with what ease Shakespeare invents it. The things said 
are worthy of kings and men. From point to point the 
harmonising explanation slips with ease. 

It satisfies the soul that the King and Prince are brought 
together in natural affection. It satisfies the civic feeling 
in us that they are both anxious for the welfare of the 
kingdom. Then, his mind at rest about his son — so far at 
peace — the old King dies ; and we part from Henry iv. as 
we part from most of Shakespeare's characters, forgiving 
all, seeing his good rather than his wrong, content that he 
should pass away in quiet. 

Meanwhile, away in Gloucestershire, far from these 
high arguments of royalties, our great magician opens the 
doors of the country life and of its rustic indwellers. We 
see the village among the low hills, and the sloping fields 
where the sower is flinging the red wheat, Shallow's 
orchard and the arbour, the pigeons in the air, the hens 
in the meadow, the smith at his forge, Hinckley Fair and 
the carrier, honest Clement Perkes o' the hill, and that 
knave Visor whom Davy, Shallow's servant, supports 
against the honest man. 

And there is Justice Shallow and Justice Silence, and 
Falstaff is their guest. And the servants have absorbed 



HENRY IV 283 

their masters' foolish ways, and the masters have grown 
like their servants ; all are fools together. The atmosphere 
and traditions of the village, centuries old; the juice of 
the common earth and its slow ways, have soaked into 
their characters, and they all think and feel in a similar 
way ; but each with a difference. Shallow is a hospitable 
fool, with a flash or two of wisdom. His talk is all repeti- 
tion, a bustling, self-important fool, but so good-natured 
that we do not regret his company. As to Justice Silence, 
he violates his name with babble. But then we only see 
him when he and Shallow, Bardolph, the Page, Davy 
and the servants are all drunk together; and Silence is 
jovial with songs, and he and Shallow are as merry as 
grigs. It is excellently well done and very harmonious. 

We have seen them all before, and they are then sober. 
But they are more agreeable drunk than sober. These 
two Justices, both of them near seventy years old, talk 
of little else than their riotous dissipation when they 
were young in London and as foolish as they are now. 
Falstaff knew them then, and heartily despises them. 
Yet he is far worse than they. He was once a decent 
gentleman. And it is piteous to think of the page of the 
Duke of Gaunt and now of the drunken satyr planning 
to cheat his host, and fleecing the villagers pricked for 
the King's service. 'Tis a vivid, rustic episode, a picture 
flung into the midst of grave affairs. Shakespeare was 
remembering his Stratford days. 

We pass from it to the great interests of London, to the 
transformation of Henry v. Once the Prince is King — 
having full room to develop himself — he carries out the 
plan, sketched in that first soliloquy, which, in his wildest 
pranks, he has never for a moment forgotten. All the 
trouble his brothers, his great lords, expect from his 
reign, he happily disappoints. He groups all the features 
of his change in his treatment of the Chief Justice whom 



284 LECTURES ON SHAKESPEARE 

lie had struck on the bench and who committed him to 
prison; and the speeches of both these high gentlemen 
are worthy of them and of the occasion. 

The speech of the King does not shirk the riotous 
past, but makes us conscious that he has always been 
the Prince. We feel, beneath his stately words, the self- 
knowledge, the self-command, the long thoughtfulness, 
the individual genius, the steadfastness of aim, which 
underlaid his wildest follies. 

And, princes all, believe me, I beseech you ; 
My father is gone wild into his grave, 
For in his tomb lie my affections ; 
And with his spirit sadly I survive, 
To mock the expectation of the world, 
To frustrate prophecies, and to raze out 
Rotten opinion, who hath writ me down 
After my seeming. The tide of blood in me 
Hath proudly flow'd in vanity till now : 
Now doth it turn, and ebb back to the sea, 
Where it shall mingle with the state of floods, 
And flow henceforth in formal majesty. 

It seems hard that at his coronation he should publicly 
abandon Falstaff, and I wish the parting had been other- 
wise done. But Shakespeare's Henry was never soft- 
hearted ; and it was amazingly insolent of Falstaff to meet 
the King before all his people at the solemnity of the 
coronation with ' God save thy Grace, King Hal ; God 
save thee, my sweet boy.' No King could bear that im- 
pertinence ! Yet, while he banished his old comrade, 
he provided him with a competence. 

Who is not sorry for Falstaff? Yet Shakespeare has 
so lowered him of late by making him a mere cheat, the 
heartless robber of Shallow, that we look on his fall as 
justice. Yet, it is pitiful. ' The King has killed his heart ' 
— and the grief of it, piling itself on his diseases, is the 
last stroke which kills the old rascal we have borne with 
and loved so long. 



HENRY IV 285 

Falstaff is a pure invention of Shakespeare's, and from 
beginning to end he is never below, and often above, the 
high level of intelligence, wit, and clear self-conscious- 
ness on which he begins to live before us. In the most 
varied circumstances, at the Eastcheap inn, before the 
Chief Justice, in the London street, on the battlefield, at 
Shallow's house in Gloucestershire, with princes, thieves, 
great earls and harlots, with London street boys and with 
country justices, he is always the same brilliant naughti- 
ness; the same observant, and self-observant human 
soul ; the clear critic of humanity and the critic of him- 
self; using all the weaknesses of mankind to minister to 
his own advantage, yet without doing any real injury, 
save by his example, to those he laughs with and plays 
upon. There's no malice in the man, no envy, hatred, 
injuriousness, no real rudeness or unkindness. He back- 
bites no one but himself. We feel kindly to him, he 
is himself so kindly. Till we meet him in the Merry 
Wives of Windsor, where he is not himself, where his 
character lives on altogether a lower level, he is harsh to 
none of his followers. And, even though they are well 
acquainted with all his sensual follies and tricks, they 
admire and even love him. Bardolph, whose pimpled 
face and flaming nose Falstaff had laughed at a hundred 
times, cried out when he heard he was dead, with all a 
rogue's passion for his master, ' Would I were with him, 
wheresome'er he is, either in heaven or in hell.' 'Aye 
sure,' answers Mrs. Quickly, whom he had fleeced and 
abused, ' he 's not in hell ; he 's in Arthur's bosom, if ever 
man went to Arthur's bosom.' There are but few respect- 
able men who would get epitaphs so affectionate from 
their friends, and so appreciative. Even the Prince, who 
knew his naughtiness, speaks of him with kindness when 
he thought him dead — 



286 LECTURES ON SHAKESPEARE 

What ! old acquaintance ! could not all this flesh 
Keep in a little life ? Poor Jack, farewell ! 
I could have better spar'd a better man. 
O ! I should have a heavy miss of thee 
If I were much in love with vanity. 

It is this absence of malice in Falstaff, and of all the foul 
companions of malice, this presence of a good-humoured 
pleasurableness, which do not so much excuse, as veil, 
his rascality and sensuality. He tolerates and is tolerated. 
He is more than tolerated; he is enjoyed. He ministers 
to the gaiety of the world, and that is good, even when 
the gaiety is of that low kind which pleased the frequent- 
ers of the Boar's Head. For the world is not only sad 
with good reason, and loves to be relieved a little of that 
sadness ; but it is also sentimentally sad, and for no good 
reason — making a great deal more of its sorrows than it 
need — and that it should be laughed out of this, even 
by rogues like Falstaff, is not bad for its morals and 
its progress. Shakespeare, as we see in Falstaff and 
Autolycus, had no dislike of the rogue, provided the rogue 
had wit enough, with kindliness, to amuse the world, 
and to sting its stupidity into some intelligence. Yet, 
the right balance is kept ; he never canonised or white- 
washed the rogue. We are not likely to sugar over the 
faults either of Autolycus or Falstaff because we are 
pleased with their wit, good-humour, and self-enjoyment. 
There is one fault, however, if Shakespeare allotted it 
to Falstaff, would have spoilt his representation of the 
man, and made him as contemptible as Parolles. The 
fault is cowardice, the fault which earned for Parolles 
absolute contempt. After the betrayal of his friends 
this boaster makes through fear, he is ignored by every 
one; he does not exist. No such contempt attaches 
itself to Falstaff. We never despise, never ignore him. 
He is blamed, rebuked, laughed at and with, but not 
despised. When we have finished the play, it does not 



HENRY IV 287 

seem natural that Falstaff should be the coward he has 
been represented to be upon the stage. He was not 
eminently brave, but he faced danger when he was forced 
to do it with the ordinary physical courage of a man, 
and Shakespeare meant that to be part of his character. 
Twice he seems to have meant otherwise — first, when at 
the highway robbery near Rochester, Falstaff runs away 
roaring from the Prince and Poins ; and again, when 
faced by Douglas on the field of Shrewsbury, he feigns 
to be dead ; and in both these cases the tradition of the 
stage represents him as a trembling coward. In the first 
instance, it is no wonder that he ran away. He was old, 
enormously fat, and quite unable to face two young and 
vigorous highwaymen. It was the best thing he could 
do; and ordinary courage, which is all we can expect 
from Falstaff, who is no hero, does not ask a man to be 
fool enough to face overwhelming odds. And to back up 
this view, neither the Prince nor Poins, when they discover 
themselves and expose FalstafFs amusing boasts, mock at 
him as a coward, but as an inconceivably audacious liar ; 
and once, when the Prince does touch on cowardice, 
Falstaff, for the moment serious, answers, ' I 'm not John 
of Gaunt, your grandfather, but no coward, Hal ! ' 

Then, when matched with 'that fiend Douglas,' he 
feigns death, we must remember that again he was over- 
matched, and that he was not such a hero as to love his 
honour more than his life. He chose life before certain 
death. It is not heroic, but it does not prove him to be 
a coward, and all the more because he had no honour 
to support. His honour he has laid by, when he fell into 
bad living. He is frank enough about that ; arguing out 
the matter like the witty rascal he is. 

Can honour set to a leg ? No. Or an arm 1 No. Or take away the 
grief of a wound 1 No. Honour hath no skill in surgery, then ? No. 
What is honour 1 A word. What is that word honour 1 Air. A trim 



288 LECTURES ON SHAKESPEARE 

reckoning ! Who hath it ? he that died o' Wednesday. Doth he feel 
it ? No. Doth he hear it ? No. It is insensible then ? Yea, to the 
dead. But will it not live with the living ? No. Why ? Detraction 
will not suffer it. Therefore 1 11 none of it : honour is a mere scutcheon : 
— And so ends my catechism. 

Having then lost this reason for standing up to Douglas, 
we can scarcely call him a coward for living up to his 
principle, and preferring life to death. Yet, if he always 
did so, if he always shirked the fight, one might fairly 
call him coward. But Shakespeare does not make him 
shirk. He is appointed by the Prince captain of a charge 
of foot. One would not place a coward there. He takes 
his men into the thick of the battle where all are slain 
but three. Sir Richard Coleville, a brave knight, yields 
to him at once. None of the princes or knights after the 
battle charge him with cowardice. The Chief Justice 
speaks of the good service he did at Shrewsbury. On the 
whole, Shakespeare meant him to love life, to think 
discretion the better part of valour, but not to represent 
him as a coward. 1 

We must remember if we wish to think of Falstaff (as 
Shakespeare drew him), that he was originally a knight 
of good repute, known even on the Continent to fame, a 
man of birth, bred up at the court, a page to John of 

1 What I have said above concerning the alleged cowardice of Falstaff 
is partly taken from an Essay on the Dramatic Character of Sir John 
Falstaff, by Maurice Morgann. It was published in 1777. Its aim is to 
prove that Falstaff was not meant by Shakespeare to be a coward, but 
it also treats of bis whole character, and incidentally and with great pene- 
tration of the genius of Shakespeare. There is not a better piece of 
Shakespearian criticism. The book is scarce, but is, I hear, to be re- 
printed. But when it was published, so strong was the opinion that 
Falstaff was meant by Shakespeare to be a coward, that every one 
laughed at it. Johnson, when he heard of it, said, 'I suppose the next 
thing will be to prove that Iago was a pattern of virtue. ' The book proves 
that Falstaff was not the coward of the stage. It ends by proving its 
point too much. Falstaff had the common courage of the common man, 
but not of the honourable man. His degraded life had taken the impulse 
of honour out of his courage. A foul life he preferred to a noble death. 
He had no honour left to lose. 



HENRY IV 289 

Gaunt, with whom he was allowed to joke ; with an ability 
which would have fitted him for good service to the 
state, witty, and a gentleman. This ancient quality and 
honour of Falstaff now and again emerge in the play, 
to touch us with the pity of their loss. They emerge 
badly in his singular insolence to the Chief Justice, which 
the Chief would not have endured at all had Falstaff not 
once been of his society, and which Falstaff (had he been 
of the same rank as Bardolph) would not have dared to 
exercise. The same thing may be said of his gross famili- 
arity with the Prince and with John of Lancaster. He is 
— though he is fallen — allowed the privilege of a gentle- 
man. That is a part of Shakespeare's presentation of him. 
But he is a fallen gentleman. He has given way at 
every point to a sensual habit — a drunkard, a glutton, 
a liar, a licentious profligate ; and, for means to indulge 
these coarse pleasures, a cheat and a robber. He is gross 
of body, diseased by vice, dependent on what he can get 
from others by flattery and dishonest practice. No means 
of getting money are dishonourable to him. It seems 
incredible that we should endure, much less like, the man. 
Yet, like the Prince, we enjoy him, at times we are fond 
of him. And we heartily forgive him all his faults — or 
rather we forget them. Why ? Well, first, we only meet 
him on the stage ; and underneath any disapproval of him 
lies our enjoyment of his pleasantry, his good humour, 
his good nature, his mellow wit, his gay way of taking 
life, his agility and cheerfulness of mind, his wild exagger- 
ation of lying, the intense enjoyment he feels in his own 
wit, and in his power of twisting out of difficulties ; his 
profound understanding of himself, his honest apprecia- 
tion of all the faults of his character, even though he 
persuades himself, when he has confessed them in a 
soliloquy, that they are or resemble virtues. All this 
is quite delightful on the stage with the deceiving veil 

T 



290 LECTURES ON SHAKESPEARE 

of representation thrown over it, ' and we give him,' as 
Morgann says, ' when the laugh is over, undeserved credit 
for the pleasure we enjoyed.' 

Secondly, he has the courage of his situation. Most 
men would be ashamed of his condition, both of body and 
mind and purse : huge of body and diseased, sensual of 
mind, beggared of money. Most men would have sunk 
down into apathy or despondency or into a debtor's 
prison. But he is curiously active of body, always gay, 
and so persuasive and attractive that his creditors lend 
him money to pay themselves. When they do not, he 
cheats or steals, and enjoys this war against society. He 
defrauds in every direction. The government does not 
escape, nor the silly magistrates, any more than Mrs. 
Quickly or the travelling merchant. Such a man we are 
not bound to like in real life, but on the stage he amuses 
us. But the real thing we like in this naughty person is 
his courage ; the way he uses all that is against him so 
that it is for him ; the bold face with which he meets life ; 
the long fight his gaiety makes against the drag down- 
ward of his vices and disease, till, at last, he can fight no 
more. We look back on him when he dies, and say with 

the Prince — 

Poor Jack, farewell ! 
I could have better spar'd a better man. 

Then, thirdly (no matter in how rude or immoral an 
envelope it is), we enjoy, provided it be not cruel or 
malicious, intellectual power, wit, quickness-in fence ; the 
power of changing front against an unsuspected difficulty, 
and, when driven into a corner, of eluding, evading, and 
escaping. FalstafF's brain is quicker than a fine fencer's 
sword. And with the quickness is a brilliancy which 
charms with its surprising turns of fancy, even of thought. 
When we contrast in our mind's eye this agility of mind 
with his enormous body, larding the earth, a new excite- 



HENRY IV 291 

ment of dramatic pleasure is added to our sight and 
hearing of Falstaff. 

Then, lastly, Falstaff, when alone, commenting on him- 
self and on the world, full of self-knowledge and of self- 
excuse, exaggerating into excellences his vices for his 
private amusement (as in his glorification of drinking 
sherris), discussing with himself how much honour is 
worth, and how much more worth is life in comparison 
with it ; chuckling over his cheating of the government, 
and exaggerating its iniquity that he may laugh at his 
own trickery and hug himself in his own pleasure, is as 
amusing and attractive as he is when he is the penetrat- 
ing commentator on persons like John of Lancaster and 
Justice Shallow. He sees with keen insight into what is 
foolish in them ; he does not see their good ; and he uses 
whatever is foolish for his own purposes. It is well to read 
these soliloquies together. He is his own painter, and his 
brush is realistic. He has, like Iago, this habit of lonely 
self-appreciation. But it is not always appreciation. 
When he remembers the past when his life was worthy, 
he is self-contemptuous, and his self-contempt makes 
him despise others. Then when he has cried down all 
the world and himself into a general scorn, and made 
goodness and badness of equal importance, he gets back 
into full satisfaction with himself. Any little pricks of 
conscience or honour which may have disturbed him he 
has got rid of by talking them out to himself; and he 
drifts easily into thinking of himself as part of the 
stream of things. ' I can't be otherwise. I am a part of 
Nature, let Nature have her way. There are fools like 
Shallow, and there are clever dogs like me, and if the 
young dace be a bait for the old pike, I see no reason in the 
law of nature but I may snap at him. But why argue 
about these things ? Let time shape, and there 's an end.' 

Thus, giving up any strife of the old goodness in him 



292 LECTURES ON SHAKESPEARE 

against his sensual nature, he is wholly lost in his 
appetites; but he gets the advantage of his bold unre- 
pentance. He does and says what he likes without 
shame. All he wants is gold that he may live his life 
of indulgence, and for that he lies unblushingly, and 
plumes himself on his lying so well. The real wonder of 
the man is that all his drink and lust have not injured 
his wits. He not only knows himself, but he knows men 
and women, and uses them when they are fools, or of his 
own degraded type. But the good or the honourable he 
cannot use; and the one person in the society he has 
made around him whom he never comprehends is the 
Prince. The deep-set, steadfast aims of Henry, the 
seriousness below the riotous exuberance, the certainty of 
being able to change when he comes to be King, never 
cross the mind of Falstaff. He thinks he will be first 
favourite of the new King ; and this is the point where 
his wit — at last spoilt by his life — fails to see clearly. 
There is something pitiful in the assurance with which 
he carries Shallow away to London, crying out that the 
c King is sick for his company, that the laws of England 
are at his commandment.' It is more pitiful still, when 
the King turns on his boon-companion, and will not 
know him — 

I know thee not, old man, fall to thy prayers ; 

and sends him to the Fleet, and then to banishment on 
pain of death ten miles from his presence. This slays 
the old man who, in his kindly heart, loved the young 
Prince with whom he had for so long played the fool. 
He cannot bear the blow. He dies as the King leaves for 
France. It was like Shakespeare to gather pity round 
the dying man whom he had created ; and in one word of 
Falstaff s old friend, Mrs. Quickly, he enshrines a crowd 
of piteous thoughts for our memory of Falstaff — 
The Kins has killed his heart. 



HENRY IV 293 

Nor did he leave him on his death-bed without images of 
innocent life, of childhood and the country life when he 
was a boy — so that we might feel, perhaps, that he would 
be pure and fresh again — 

'A made a finer end, and went away, an it had been any christom 
child ; 'a parted even just between twelve and one, even at the turning 
o 5 the tide ; for after I saw him fumble with the sheets, and play with 
flowers, and smile upon his fingers' ends, I knew there was but one 
way ; for his nose was as sharp as a pen, and 'a babbled of green fields. 

Well, there are green fields, I trust, where he is gone, for 
surely he lives ; and he and his like, in those sweet 
pastures, are children again. 



X 
HENRY V 

Henry V. is the natural conclusion of Henry IV., and yet 
its spirit is quite different from that of its predecessor. 
We feel that Shakespeare was glad to emerge in it from 
English questions of statecraft, from civil wars and 
dissensions among the nobility, into one plain issue — 
a war with France, with which, as he wrote, he could 
sympathise more than he could with civil war ; by which, 
though in an unjust war, the various parties in England 
(when Scroop, Cambridge, and Grey were executed) were 
united in one aim under one King. It had been difficult 
to give a full swing to his patriotic feeling, when he had 
to feel blame for both sides in the civil wars of Henry iv. 
It was not difficult now, but joyful, to let himself loose on 
the honour and greatness of England ; and he has done it 
in this play. The play is a song, with trumpets, to the 
glory of England, and it is full to the brim not only with 
the exultation of the patriot, but also with the spirit of 
joy in the artist. This side of the play I state fully; but 
it was tempered and modified by thoughts of the immoral 
side of war. 

Every one has said that it can scarcely be called a 
legitimate drama. It tries to be one, but it does not 
succeed. It begins dramatically ; it introduces the low 
life of the town which Shakespeare had represented in 
Henry IV. in contrast with the grave council of the King, 
the Church and the nobles. But he drops this contrast 
after the first Act, and we are wholly involved in the 

294 



HENRY V 295 

events of the war, told one after another in a series of 
tableaux ; the manner of which the elder Dumas imitated 
for the stage in certain dramas about Napoleon and the 
Revolution. Dramatic tableaux might be a fair definition 
of Henry V. ; and the insertion of a Chorus at the begin- 
ning of each Act, in which the history of what we are to 
see is sketched, seems to support this definition. 

The writer's aim is rather to describe action than to 
present the souls of men in dialogue. He, being Shake- 
speare, does open to us the hearts of the speakers, but that 
is not here his main object. His main object is to tell the 
tale of a glorious hour in the history of England, of a great 
battle won against gigantic odds by the heroism of his 
people, and of a great War-Leader who in this hour of 
terrible danger showed himself a hero ; a great English- 
man who redeemed the faults of his character by unyield- 
ing courage in mortal danger, by trust in himself and in 
his soldiers, and by intellectual war — the Clive of the 
Middle Age of England. 

In the first Chorus, where Shakespeare draws that flash- 
ing picture of the Monarch of War, in poetic menace and 
splendour, 

Then should the warlike Harry, like himself, 
Assume the port of Mars ; and at his heels, 
Leash'd in like hounds, should famine, sword, and fire 
Crouch for employment, 

he appeals to the audience to help him out with their 
imagination. If you see one horseman, see a squadron ; if 
you look round on this cockpit, behold the vasty fields of 
France ; when you see the walls of this theatre, see Eng- 
land on one side, France on the other, and roll between 
them the perilous narrow seas. When you listen, hear 
kings speaking, soldiers chatting round the watchfires, 
arrows hissing through the air, horses trampling in the 
charge, the shouting of beleaguered towns, the noise of 



296 LECTURES ON SHAKESPEARE 

defeat, the thanksgiving of the victors, the quietude of 
Peace. 

What confidence Shakespeare, when he demanded this 
for his naked stage, had in his power to stir the creative 
imagination of his audience, to be the poet who bodies 
forth the shape of things not seen, who places the listener 
now in London, now in Paris, under the walls of Harfleur, on 
the field of Agincourt — in the space of a single hour ! And, 
indeed, what confidence also he had in his audience ; what 
a full belief in their imaging power ! Everything that 
scenery can tell is now told to us. We call for * spectacle ' 
to help our jaded creativeness. But no scenery save a few 
boards was needed to make an Elizabethan audience see 
the dreadful fight at Agincourt. 

I have said that Shakespeare, leaving with pleasure 
behind him the civil broils of the last reign, came with 
eagerness to tell of a King whom, at least in a great 
portion of the play, and in contrast with Henry iv., he 
represents as an open-hearted, bluff, plain-spoken, fighting 
King; and of a victory, not over brother Englishmen, 
but over a foreign foe. It is plain that he enjoyed this 
part of his task. He was not a fighter himself, but he 
who had lived with Essex, Raleigh, Sidney, Drake and 
Howard could not avoid the thrill of war, the leaping of 
his blood when he heard of the great deeds of England 
in past wars, against heavy odds ; when, among the shout- 
ing crowd, he welcomed the news of the singeing of 
Philip's beard in Spain, or saw the ships of Drake and the 
adventurers come up the Thames with their bellies filled 
with the ill-got gold of Spain. This temper runs through 
all his historical plays, and rings on them like steel on 
steel. It is a temper which has never been otherwise 
than powerful, chiefly for good, sometimes for evil, in this 
realm of England. 

It is mixed up with the temper of patriotism — that is, 



HENRY V 297 

the love of our country as our Mother and our Home; 
our love of her Honour in the past ; our faith in her as 
the refuge of our children and of liberty in the future. 
Our duty, indeed our passion, is to keep her national 
traditions free for noble development, her indwellers free 
from oppression, and her coasts free from the invader. 
War for these duties and this love, war in defence of all 
we hold dear, is part of a just patriotism; and all Shake- 
speare's set outbursts of patriotic feeling in the historical 
plays, on the lips of Gaunt, Faulconbridge, Hereford, and 
others, are directed to this aspect of patriotism — defence 
of England against the foreigner — a view of love of 
country which the attempt of the Armada must have 
driven home to the heart of Shakespeare and of every 
Englishman. 

Nothing of this special emotion of patriotism could 
have filled the soul of Shakespeare as he wrote this 
play, for in it England was not invaded, but the invader. 
She was, in war, doing the very thing to another nation, 
which it was part of her high patriotism not to permit 
being done to her. The war was a wicked because an 
aggressive war ; and its only result was to sow the dragon 
seed of the wars in France, and of the renewed civil wars 
in England, when punishment of it fell on the House of 
Lancaster in direful ruin, and then on the House of York. 
Shakespeare knew this well. He never forgets this woeful 
aspect of the war he pictures. 

In what way then could patriotism speak ? How could 
Shakespeare, in this play, exalt the glory of England, 
when the war was, he knew, first unjust, and then 
fatal ? 

Well, the natural, the inevitable feeling of the mass of 
any people is to wish passionately that its folk may have 
the better of its opponents. One might as well try to 
push back the tidal wave as the swell of this national 



298 LECTURES ON SHAKESPEARE 

emotion. It has the force of a natural law. Now and 
then, men to whom Justice is dearer than this desire for 
the victory of their people rise so far above nature as to 
wish that their countrymen should be beaten in battle. 
They are brushed away by the national passion of which 
I speak. Shakespeare shared in that passion. Whatever 
origin the war had, he wished his people to win. And 
Henry Y. is full of that common excitement. It is not 
a lofty element in patriotism, but it is a natural and 
inevitable part of it. 

Again, patriotism, when it is ill-married to the weakness 
of national vanity, gives birth to national contempts. 
Each nation, while extolling itself, laughs the other to 
scorn. This is natural enough, but it is a fruitful source 
of wrong and folly. It has been thought for centuries in 
England to be a part of patriotism. The spirit of Nelson's 
sailors was the spirit of Englishmen towards the French, 
from the days of Creci almost to the present day. Shake- 
speare himself is guilty of it in his picture of the French 
Dauphin and nobles before the battle. He enhances the 
glory of England when he sets the boastful splashing of 
the French over against the modest steadfastness of the 
English. It is a piece of his patriotism, but not a wise 
or useful one. 

The third element in this patriotism of war was the 
most natural, the most useful to the nation, and the 
most noble. It was founded on admiration and affection 
for those qualities in the English which, in moments 
of tremendous trial, against overwhelming odds, enable 
them to win the victory. The French at Agincourt 
were five times more numerous than the English. 
They were well fed, their army was in good trim. The 
English were half-starved, ill-clad, and in retreat. But 
they had great steadfastness, unfaltering courage, belief 
in their leaders, unquestioning obedience, discipline, and 



HENRY V 299 

the modesty of brave men. With these they won the 
battle. To praise and be proud of such a victory, to 
remember it for ever as a national encouragement, an 
inspiring tradition; to keep up in a people the honour 
and practice of the high qualities that won it ; to scorn 
death rather than be false to its spirit — that would be 
part of a true patriotism, and of its praise from genera- 
tion to generation, even if the war in which it was proved 
was in its origin unjust or in its aim unworthy. For 
these are qualities which exist in a people, independently 
of the follies and greed of the rulers who have caused 
the war. 

And it is on these deep-set, noble qualities in the 
nature of his countrymen that Shakespeare most dwells 
in this patriotic poem. He embodies them all in the 
King before and after that battle- day; for he knew the 
weight of a single representative figure. But he does 
not neglect to show them in the great gentlemen of the 
kingdom — in York and Suffolk, Exeter and Sir Thomas 
Erpingham; in the captains and officers like Fluellen, 
in Welsh and Scotch and Irish, united in war, if divided 
in peace; and in the common soldiers like John Bates, 
Alexander Court, and Michael Williams. Each, in his 
several character, represents those typical elements of 
the English character which won, against enormous odds, 
the fight at Agincourt. 

Nowhere in the historical plays is Shakespeare greater 
than in this representation. Its note is struck in the 
first words Henry says on the morning of the battle — 

Gloucester, 'tis true we are in great danger ; 
The greater therefore should our courage be. 

And then with a light humour of moralising (as if death 
at hand kindled a smiling courage), he proves there is 
a 'soul of goodness in things evil' because their bad 



300 LECTURES ON SHAKESPEARE 

neighbours and their evil case had made them rise 

early, 

Which is both healthful, and good husbandry. 

Then, as Henry goes through his camp disguised, he meets 
Fluellen, who dwells on the wakeful discipline of the 
English army in contrast with the noisy carelessness of 
the French — 

Gow. Why, the enemy is loud ; you hear him all night. 

Flu. If the enemy is an ass and a fool, and a prating coxcomb, is it 
meet, think you, that we should also, lock you, be an ass, and a fool, 
and a prating coxcomb, — in your own conscience now ? 

Gow. I will speak lower. 

K. Hen. Though it appear a little out of fashion, 

There is much care and valour in this Welshman. 

Then the soldiery, Bates and Court and Williams, discuss, 
quite quietly, the rights and wrongs of war as it affects 
them, but it never occurs to them to abandon their ranks, 
fail in obedience, or shirk a battle where they look for 
certain death. The King comes on them, disguised. 
Bates tells him that the King (whatever outward courage 
he wears) would wish to be anywhere else. No, answers 
Henry — nowhere else than here. And the soldiers chime 
in with the King and accept the battle. 

The nobles also know the danger, but they face it with 

j°y— 

Salis. God's arm strike with us ! 'tis a fearful odds. 

God be wi' you, princes all ; I '11 to my charge ; 
If we no more meet till we meet in heaven, 
Then, joyfully, my noble Lord of Bedford, 
My dear Lord Gloucester, and my good Lord Exeter, 
And my kind kinsman, — warriors all, adieu ! 

This is the temper in which the nobles, as the soldiers, 
go, they think, to death ; and the temper in which they 
die is told by Shakespeare with a lovely grace and tender- 



HENRY V 301 

ness when Suffolk and York kiss one another into 

heaven — 

Exeter. Suffolk first died ; and York, all haggled over, 
Comes to him, where in gore he lay insteep'd, 
And takes him by the beard ; kisses the gashes 
That bloodily did yawn upon his face ; 
And cries aloud, ' Tarry, dear cousin Suffolk ! 
My soul shall thine keep company to heaven ; 
Tarry, sweet soul, for mine, then fly abreast, 
As in this glorious and well-foughten field 
We kept together in our chivalry ! ' 
Upon these words I came and cheer'd him up : 
He smiled me in the face, raught me his hand, 
And with a feeble gripe, says, ' Dear my lord, 
Commend my service to my sovereign.' 
So did he turn, and over Suffolk's neck 
He threw his wounded arm, and kiss'd his lips ; 
And so espoused to death, with blood he seal'd 
A testament of noble-ending love. 

They are lines which rob the battlefield of its horror and 
plant it with heartsease. And in a thousand stories 
of the private soldier, as well as of the officer and the 
gentleman, the tale of York and Suffolk has been repeated ; 
for, indeed, nowhere does the divine greatness and beauty 
of human nature bloom with more eternal tenderness than 
in the crimson furrows of war. 

The splendour and national inspiration of such steadfast 
valour break forth in the words of Henry before the 
battle ; and their spirit is the spirit which makes nations 
great in peace as well as in war. It issues, as a bright 
stream, from days of heavy battle; but it is not the 
spirit of mere fighting ; it is not born of the false glory 
of war. It is in the soul of men ; and to praise it and 
urge it into act deserves the name of patriotism. Shake- 
speare put that spirit on the lips of Henry, and touched 
it with a grave humility ; and the noble words arose out 
of the spiritual depth of a patriot King's emotion, rejoic- 
ing in his people's character. So far he is the patriot of 
war ; so far Henry is his hero. 



302 LECTURES ON SHAKESPEARE 

But he does not leave the other side of war unre- 
presented, nor is his hero free from its evils. The war 
Henry waged with France was an unjust and cruel war; 
base also in its origin. Shakespeare does not shirk that 
aspect of it. He seems to have had a steady but prudent 
hatred of all war which sacrificed the people to the 
advantage of kites and crows, of kings and nobles. At 
least, I hold that to be the underdrift of the historical 
plays and of Coriolanus. 

He represents the Church, the King, and the Palace 
clique as the sources of the war, and each acting for his 
own advantage. The play opens with a conversation 
between the Bishop of Ely and the Archbishop of 
Canterbury. It seems the Commons had brought 
forward a bill which would strip the Church of half its 
temporal lands, and bring the proceeds to the State. 
1 What is to be done ? ' they ask. c Why, get round the 
King. He is a true lover of holy Church ; he is miracu- 
lously changed; he can even reason in divinity. With 
regard to the bill itself he is, alas ! indifferent. But he is 
not indifferent to war. If we can prove he has some claim 
of descent to heirships in France, he will let this bill alone, 
and take our part ; and we will offer him an immense sum 
for the expenses of the war. Let us then get up the war, 
and save the temporalities of the Church.' This is the 
remarkable conduct of the Church ; and the whole repre- 
sentation of the ecclesiastical hypocrisy and trickery of 
these mitred rascals is a masterpiece of sugared scorn and 
indignation. 

Then the Archbishop, in council, proves to the King's 
satisfaction, and on the flimsiest ground, that Henry is 
the rightful heir to France ; and urges war, bloody war. 
He paints the Black Prince at Creci, how he foraged 
in blood of French nobility; he blows the trumpet of 
English fame and bids the King awake his blood and 



HENRY V 303 

courage. The men of England, he cries, long for the 
battle. Take them to France, 

With blood, and sword, and fire, to win your right : 

In aid whereof, we of the spiritually 

Will raise your highness such a mighty sum 

As never did the clergy at one time 

Bring in to any of your ancestors. 

A vile Christian, but a good politician! Without one 
thought of pity for the miseries war will bring on the 
French and English people, without one prophetic glance 
into the future, the Archbishop of the Christian Church 
of England unleashes, for the sake of gain, famine, sword, 
and fire, the three dark hounds of war ; and then, when 
he has got his wicked way, assumes the philosopher, 
wears the statesman's air, and delivers that famous speech 
which compares the divers functions of men in a kingdom 
to the ordered polity of the bees. Shakespeare displays a 
master-hypocrite. How far the tale is historically true, I 
do not know. But that is his picture of the matter, and a 
splendid piece of irony it is. 

And now, how is the King made by Shakespeare to 
behave in this question of war ? He also starts this bloody 
business for the sake of policy, not for any just cause. He 
fears the nobility and all the feuds left behind by his 
father's seizure of the crown. War will occupy their 
minds ; they love war, and they shall have it. His father, 
dying, recommended that. 

Therefore, my Harry, 
Be it thy course to busy giddy minds 
With foreign quarrels ; that action, hence borne out, 
May waste the memory of the former days. 

And the last words of the play of Henry IV. show that the 
new King, to secure his power, had already resolved on war 
with France. I will lay odds, says Lancaster, 



30-i LECTURES ON SHAKESPEARE 

that, ere this year expire, 
We bear our civil swords and native fire 
As far as France. I heard a bird so sing, 
Whose music, to my thinking, pleased the king. 

So, as Shakespeare puts it, the Archbishop of Canterbury 
knew the King's mind before he made his solemn argu- 
ment ; and the King's speech, warning the Archbishop 
not to let loose the dogs of war unless on the gravest 
ground, was realty a piece of hypocrisy, spoken to play the 
part of a temperate, just, and thoughtful monarch, while 
all the time his craft had resolved on war. This is what 
Shakespeare represents, and he disapproved of it. He 
makes that clear by the subtle address to the Archbishop 
with which the King opens the council. While the 
King speaks, he knows the Archbishop wants war, and he 
himself is resolved on war. The whole passage is steeped 
in irony, and the last lines (again remembering that 
war was already settled on between them) are really Shake- 
speare's gird with bitter scorn at the Archbishop — 

Under this conjuration speak, my lord ; 
For we will hear, note and believe in heart 
That what you speak is in your conscience wash'd 
As pure as sin with baptism. 

Nevertheless, the King in the midst of his crafty policy is 
supposed by Shakespeare to have something of a conscience. 
The Church is represented as having none at all. 

Many think that Shakespeare painted Henry as the 
perfect king ; as almost the perfect man. I am surprised 
when I read that view. Shakespeare sat far too close to 
fact to represent Henry as entirely noble. He painted him 
as he was : the crafty politician, the steadfast, masterly 
leader of men; England's hero-warrior; merciful in 
peace, ruthless and resolute in war, mild to his own, fierce 
to his foes as long as they fought against him. His 
speech to the burghers of Harfleur is the speech of one 



HENRY V 305 

who will not spare, to get his ends, one jot of the horrors 
of war to a conquered town. 

His soldiers, if the town does not yield, shall have their 
full and savage way with women and children and old 
men. When, in the year after Agincourt, at the siege of 
Rouen, the town turned out twelve thousand men, women 
and children who would have weakened the defence, Henry 
would not let them pass through his lines. These innocent 
defenceless folk, down to the helpless children, died of 
starvation. It is well to remember that story when this 
English king is exalted into a perfect character ; and it 
was well that Shakespeare should ask his imagination 
what lay beneath the glory of war. He replied by record- 
ing its horrors, and he puts them into the mouth of Henry 
at several points in the play ; and with a certain irony, 
for Henry has made the war for his own purposes. He 
records them even more clearly when Burgundy, at the 
end of the play, describes what France had suffered from 
the curse of war — 

What rub or what impediment there is, 
Why that the naked, poor and mangled Peace, 
Dear nurse of arts, plenties and joyful births, 
Should not in this best garden of the world, 
Our fertile France, put up her lovely visage 1 
Alas, she hath from France too long been chased, 
And all her husbandry doth lie on heaps, 
Corrupting in its own fertility. 
Her vine, the merry cheerer of the heart, 
Unpruned dies ; her hedges even-pleach'd, 
Like prisoners wildly overgrown with hair. 
Put forth disorder'd twigs ; her fallow leas 
The darnel, hemlock, and rank fumitory 
Doth root upon, while that the coulter rusts 
That should deracinate such savagery ; 
The even mead, that erst brought sweetly forth 
The freckled cowslip, burnet and green clover, 
Wanting the scythe, all uncorrected, rank, 
Conceives by idleness, and nothing teems 
But hateful docks, rough thistles, kecksies, burs, 
Losing both beauty and utility. 

U 



306 LECTURES ON SHAKESPEARE 

And as our vineyards, fallows, meads and hedges, 
Defective in their natures, grow to wildness, 
Even so our houses and ourselves and children 
Have lost, or do not learn for want of time, 
The sciences that should become our country ; 
But grow like savages, — as soldiers will 
That nothing do but meditate on blood, — 
To swearing and stern looks, diffused attire 
And everything that seems unnatural. 
Which to reduce into our former favour 
You are assembled : and my speech entreats 
That I may know the let, why gentle Peace 
Should not expel these inconveniences 
And bless us with her former qualities. 

The picture is pitiful, but it does not move Henry in the 

least from his unjust demand. He will have his pound 

of flesh — 

If, Duke of Burgundy, you would have peace, 

. . . you must buy that peace 
With fall accord to all our just demands ; 

and the just demand is that he should be acknowledged 
as heir to the kingdom of France. This is to be the mere 
conqueror, not the hero. Two years afterwards he was 
dead, dead at the height of his conquering glory. 

Where Shakespeare does make the King heroic, is in 
his conduct before and after the battle. He enforces dis- 
cipline on his soldiers. He insists that all goods taken 
shall be paid for. He hangs those followers of his who 
steal from the churches or the country-folk, and poor 
Nym and Bardolph perish in that fashion. He will have 
mercy shown to the captives. As long as he is not in 
actual battle, he is temperate in counsel. And when he 
is brought to bay, when, as the great war-leader, he is face 
to face with almost certain defeat and death, his attitude 
is indeed heroic. The desperate situation brings out all 
his manhood, fortitude, courage, and goodness. He is 
gentle, good-humoured, wearing a face of joy like a man 
inspired, full of trust in himself and his men, almost 



HENRY V 307 

looking for victory ! He will not ask another man from 
England. Proud of his brave soldiers, he is humble 
before God in whom he trusts. 'Not in our hands,' he 
cries, ' Lord, lies victory, but in thine.' The way God 
is used by priests and kings in war is as irritating as it 
is impertinent, but still to confess Him as master of 
history (and not ourselves as Shakespeare represents 
France doing), has at least some grace, some humility, 
and therefore a nobler war-temper than to confess no 
power but our own. In all this Shakespeare does draw 
a hero. 

But, again, he does not leave this splendid picture 
without painting another, of his own proper invention, to 
balance its effect. The King, going in disguise through 
the camp, meets three of the common soldiers who are in 
arms for his cause, and know nothing about it. They 
question his responsibility. ' We are,' they say, ' the King's 
subjects. We know not why he brings us into battle. If 
his cause be wrong, our obedience to the King wipes the 
crime of it out of us. If the cause be not good, the King 
has a heavy reckoning to make. All the slain will testify 
against him at the judgment day.' The soldier suffers 
in obedience to the warring King. Let the King look to 
it that his cause is just, else he makes every soldier sin — 
and that may be a black reckoning for the King. Henry's 
answer is so sophistical that I see in it another example 
of Shakespeare's irony. But the King has listened, and 
is left alone to think on what he has heard. And in 
an hour of revelation, when he is alone with God and his 
soul, Shakespeare makes the King see what he really is ; 
and what difference there is between him and the peasant 
he has made his soldier. Policy has slipped from him, 
kingship has left him, the fiery fever of the great captain 
of war is dead in his heart. He is only a man among men. 
He shows the same temper as he shows in his speech 



308 LECTURES ON SHAKESPEARE 

to his father on his death-bed, so closely does Shake- 
speare keep the unity of his characters. He continues 
the thought with which he was full when he began his 
talk with Bates and Will — 

I think the king is but a man, as I am : the violet smells to him as 
it doth to me : the element shows to him as it doth to me : all his 
senses have but human conditions : his ceremonies laid by, in his 
nakedness he appears but a man, and though his affections are higher 
mounted than ours, yet, when they stoop, they stoop with the like 
wing. 

It is a noble, thoughtful temper, full of humanity, of 
apartness from his self, but it creeps back into self- 
consideration. The sense of kingship and the resolution 
to keep the powers of a king, which he has forgotten at 
the beginning, rise to the surface towards the end of the 
soliloquy. Conscience and kingcraft, as often before, meet 
at the end of it again. The soliloquy is a grave piece of 
thoughtful poetry. It is Shakespeare's vision of the finer 
nature of the man within the trappings of the king. 
But see how it ends — with a piece of self-deceit ! ' The 
peasant,' Henry says, 'sleeps at ease, the king wakes; 
the peasant has the vantage of the king, but he little 
knows 

What watch the king keeps to maintain the peace, 
Whose hours the peasant most advantages.' 

Yet, it was not peace that Henry had maintained, but 
war. 

It is always a new wonder how close Shakespeare is to 
human nature. He knew that a man, after a shock of 
conscience, will, by the very confession of his wrong and 
weakness, induce forgetfulness of the weakness and the 
wrong, and even glide back into believing that his weak- 
ness has been strength, and his wrong right. It is 
another wonder that Shakespeare — seeing so clearly into 
the poor stuff of which we, and even heroes, are made, 



HENRY V 309 

realising the immense force of our self-deceit — should yet 
have a great reverence left for human nature, should 
forgive it so bounteously, and take in it such brave, 
serious, and heartfelt pleasure. It is this sane, bright- 
eyed, tolerant, almost divine way of seeing humanity 
which gives him at least a fourth of his power over man- 
kind. To say this is not here out of place, because it is in 
this play that Shakespeare expresses (in a grave mirthful- 
ness on the lips of the King) one of the roots of his own 
thinking — 

There is some soul of goodness in things evil, 
Would men observingly distil it out. 

I may say one word more on this representation of the 
1 for and against ' of war. It was a habit, almost a trick, 
of Shakespeare's to parody — sometimes for the sake of 
humour, sometimes to strengthen a main issue of thought 
or action — the doings of the great by the doings of the 
common folk. He has done this, for example, in Richard 
III., in Coriolanus, and in the Tempest. Here, in the 
ridiculous dialogue between Pistol and his French 
prisoner, the action and the motives of Henry's invasion 
of France are parodied. The greed of the King is echoed 
by the greed of Pistol. The war is a bandit's war. 
Pistol will have his ransom of two hundred crowns ; if 
not, death to his captive. Henry will have the whole of 
France ; if not, France shall perish. 

Yet, while we have all these contrasted issues of the 
war-question presented to us, one thing remains supreme 
— the uplifting passion with which Shakespeare re- 
membered and praised the mighty deed of Agincourt ; 
the spiritual glory of facing with hope and valiancy of 
heart enormous odds, for the sake of the ideals and 
memories of England. That rings through the whole 
play, and it still rings in our hearts. The splendid war- 
chorus at the beginning of the fourth Act tells us, with 



310 LECTURES ON SHAKESPEARE 

uplifted passion, how Shakespeare felt when he looked 
back on the days of England's steadfastness and valour ; 
how he felt when he heard the news of the great sea-fight 
in the narrow seas against the boasting odds of the 
Armada. 

And now, as we look back on this treatment in art and 
by the artist-imagination of the question of war and the 
glory of war — not treated in a discussion, not from the 
point of view either of morality or philosophy or even of 
philanthropy, but embodied and explained by the art- 
creation of men of different types who, with no conscious 
reference to that question, nevertheless set it forth in 
different lights by speaking as their characters, their 
place in life, their interests and circumstances urge them 
— are we not amazed with the extraordinary balance of 
the poet's judgment ? Some have seen nothing in this 
play but what we should vulgarly call Jingoism. They 
must be blind, or only read the Act in which Agincourt is 
fought. Yet, even in that Act, how much is said against 
the temper of the Jingo ! The whole representation of 
war, by Shakespeare, is a miracle of quiet, temperate, 
austere judgment. A just and equal hand holds the 
balance. 

Let me briefly repeat the representation. On one side, 
he reveals, with irony, the picture of a ruthless war waged 
for a cause not just, but unjust; set on foot, not for 
defence but for aggression; begun not even for glory, but 
for selfish policy; and the judgment is a condemnation. 
But, on the other side, he paints another picture. In the 
course of the war the King and his English are at death's 
door, devoid of all things but the courage of the soul, but 
love of the honour of England. Their King is great- 
minded, and so are they, in this overmastering hour, in 
which all that makes the heart of England great is tried 
to the uttermost. And Shakespeare, while he does not 



HENRY V 311 

forget the wrongs of the war, feels the magnificence and 
magnanimity of this, records it in words which shall 
never be forgotten, himself thrills with it, and thrills his 
readers, and sends its glory down to us, to inspire our 
valour, our steadfastness, and our love of the noble soul 
of England. For it was the soul which conquered at 
Agincourt. 

This manifold representation of the facts is marked by 
just judgment, many-sidedness, penetrative imagination 
of human nature, sanity of intellect, natural and healthy 
passion; and its various phases are embodied in speech 
which in every case arises, as it were inevitably, out of the 
situation, and is fitted to the characters that speak it. 
This is genius at work — the genius of a great dramatist. 

And now, it is well to touch, briefly, the more poetic 
or rhetorical passages in the play. But, first, we are some- 
times jarred by lines and phrases out of tune with the 
situation, and out of tune with Shakespeare. This is 
owing to the playwrights who, seeing that money was to 
be made out of a play which glorified England, pirated 
and bedevilled it, adding to Shakespeare and subtracting ; 
decking him out with inserted plumes to please an excited 
audience fond of war, and of the coarse thought which so 
often attends on war. 

Then again, in such a play, made up of a series of tab- 
leaux, pictorial poetry will be prominent ; and the pictures 
are extraordinarily vivid. Their sharpness of drawing is 
as great as their colouring. The picture of the French 
nobles in wild excitement before the battle, of the Dauphin 
crying ' Ha, ha ! ' as he scents the victory, of his horse, the 
Pegasus who bounds from the earth — 

When I bestride him, I soar, I am a hawk ; he trots the air ; the 
earth sings when he touches it ; the basest horn of his hoof is more 
musical than the pipe of Hermes — 

could scarcely be bettered. 



312 LECTURES ON SHAKESPEARE 

The noble picture of York and Suffolk dying on the 
field I have already mentioned. The picture in Chorus iv. 
of the army before the battle, in the grey of the early 
morning, and of Henry passing through their camp to 
hearten them with the comfort of his courage and hope, 
is alive in every word with the power of English poetry. 
The second Chorus paints with imaginative exultation 
England, that little body with a mighty heart, preparing 
for war — 

Now all the youth of England are on fire, 
And silken dalliance in the wardrobe lies ; 
Now thrive the armourers, and honour's thought 
Reigns solely in the breast of every man. 

The third Chorus is a masterpiece of descriptive poetry, 
full of surprises of the imagination, of splendid, happy 
words, and of resplendent pictures — 

Suppose that you have seen 
The well-appointed king at Hampton pier 
Embark his royalty ; and his brave fleet 
With silken streamers the young Phoebus fanning : 
Play with your fancies, and in them behold 
Upon the hempen tackle ship-boys climbing ; 
Hear the shrill whistl^ which doth order give 
To sounds confused : behold the threaden sails, 
Borne with the invisible and creeping wind, 
Draw the huge bottoms through the furrow'd sea, 
Breasting the lofty surge. 0, do but think 
You stand upon the rivage, and behold 
A city on th' inconstant billows dancing ; 
For so appears this fleet majestical, 
Holding due course to Harfleur. Follow, follow ! 

Nor is the Chorus to Act v. less to be studied for de- 
scriptive power. It is not so vivid as the others, but in it 
at least is contained that concentrated line which strikes 
out into form the quintessence of London, and is more 
true now than it was then — 

But now behold, 
In the quick forge and working-house of thought, 
How London doth pour forth her citizens ! 



HENRY V 313 

These are splendid rhetoric in poetry, and the subject 
demands and excuses high rhetoric. Yet, when we think 
of the opportunity the glory of the great battle afforded 
for gorgeous rhetoric, we wonder with what a great artist's 
reticence Shakespeare has measured his words, and chast- 
ened the exuberance he might have been justified in 
using. 

Finally, I draw attention to one of those dignified, 
grave, half-philosophical, half-political pieces of thought- 
ful poetry of which this play and Henry IV. are full. 
Weighty with intellect, they are inflamed throughout by 
imagination. I have quoted some of these already. I 
quote this in conclusion, well known as it is, that I may 
leave a solemn music in our ears. He is describing an 
ordered commonwealth, and compares it to the common- 
wealth of the bees — 

Therefore doth Heaven divide 
The state of man in divers functions, 
Setting endeavour in continual motion ; 
To which is fixed, as an aim or butt, 
Obedience : for so work the honey bees, 
Creatures that by a rule in nature teach 
The act of order to a peopled kingdom. 
They have a king, and officers of sorts ; 
Where some, like magistrates, correct at home, 
Others, like merchants, venture trade abroad ; 
Others, like soldiers, armed in their stings, 
Make boot upon the summer's velvet buds, 
Which pillage they with merry march bring home 
To the tent-royal of their emperor ; 
Who, busied in his majesty, surveys 
The singing masons building roofs of gold, 
The civil citizens kneading up the honey, 
The poor mechanic porters crowding in 
Their heavy burdens at his narrow gate, 
The sad-eyed justice, with his surly hum, 
Deliv'ring o'er to executors pale 
The lazy yawning drone. 

O wonderful poet ! Every hive in the world is alive in 
that description — and every city of men. 

x 



Printed by T. and A. Constable, Printers to His Majesty 
at the Edinburgh University Press 




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